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"Andrew  Keen  has  found  the  off  switch  for  Silicon  Valley's  reality-distortion  field. 
With  a  cold  eye  and  a  cutting  wit,  he  reveals  the  grandiose  claims  of  our  new  digital 
plutocrats  to  be  little  more  than  self-serving  cant.  Digital  Vertigo  provides  a  timely  and 
welcome  reminder  that  having  substance  is  more  important  than  being  transparent." 
-Nicholas  Carr,  author  of  The  Shallows:  What  the  Internet  Is  Doing  to  Our  Brains 


#digitalvertigo 

how  today's 
online  social  revolution 
is  dividing,  diminishing, 
and  disorienting  us 


ajkeen 


andrew  keen,  author  of  the  cult  of  the  amateur 


$25.99/$2< 


'Digital  Vertigo  provides  an  articulate,  measured, 

rian  voice  against  a  sea  of  hype  about 
auo.ai  nnedia.  As  an  avowed  technology  optii..._ 


-Larry  Downes,  author  of 

ishina  the  Killer 


does  mark  zuckerberg  know 


A/hv  are  we  al 


details  of  their  lives 


and  Google+ 
exposes  the 
trillion-dollar 


?  In  Digital  Vertigo,  Andrew  Keen 
atest  Silicon  Valley  mania:  today's 
cr^r-ia|  networking  revolution 


online  start-up,  he  reveals— from  commerce  to 
communications  to  entertainment-is  now  going 
social  in  a  transformation  called  "Web  3.0." 


■    ■  ^hat  he  calls  this  "cult  of  the  socii 

i  jeopardizing  both  our  individual  privacy  and 
liberty.  Using  one  of  Alfred  Hitchcock's  greatest 
films.  Vertigo,  as  his  starting  point,  he  argues 
that  social  media,  with  its  generation  of  massive 

mounts  of  personal  data,  is  encouraging  us  to 
fall  in  love  with  something  that  is  too  good  to  be 
true-a  radically  transparent  twenty-first-century 
society  in  which  we  can  all  supposedly  realize  oi"- 

luthentic  identities  on  the  Internet. 

Digital  Vertigo  is  the  first  substantial  critique 
jf  Web  3.0.  Written  with  Keen's  trademark  humor 
and  erudition,  Digital  Vertigo  will  make  anyone 
who  has  ever  questioned  the  purpose  of  Facebook 
or  Twitter  think  more  deeply  about  a  social 

networking  world  in  which,  for  better  or  worse, 

we  are  all  now  enmeshed. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2013 


http://archive.org/details/digitalvertigoOOkeen 


J)TGITAi! 


!W 


ALSO  BY  ANDREW  KEEN 

The  Cult  of  the  AmoJeur:  How  Today's  Internet  Is  Killing  Our  Culture 


J"    \ 

DIGITAL 

vi::iiGO 


HOW   TODAY'S    ONLINE    SOCIAL    REVOLUTION 
S    DiViDiNG,    DiMINLSHiNG,    AND    DiSORiENTJNG    US 


ANDREW       KEEN 


ST.     MARTIN'S    PRESS      «J      NEW    YORK 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO.  Copyright  ©  2012  by  Andrew  Keen.  All  rights  reserved.  Printed  in  the  United 
States  of  America.  For  information,  address  St.  Martin's  Press,  175  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York,  N.Y. 
10010. 

www.stmartins.com 

Design  by  Omar  Chapa 

ISBN  978-0-312-62498-9  (hardcover) 
ISBN  978-1-4299-4096-2  (e-book) 

First  Edition:  May  2012 

10     987654321 


ForMKandHK 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION:   HYPERVISIBILITY       1 

1.  A  SIMPLE  IDEA  OF  ARCHITECTURE       19 

2.   LET'S  GET  NAKED       46 

3.  VISIBILITY  IS  A  TRAP       65 

4.   DIGITAL  VERTIGO       84 

5.  THE  CULT  OF  THE  SOCIAL       106 

6.  THE  AGE  OF  THE  GREAT  EXHIBITION       121 

7.  THE  AGE  OF  GREAT  EXHIBITIONISM       145 

8.  THE  BEST  PICTURE  OF  2011       161 
CONCLUSION:  THE  WOMAN  IN  BLUE      180 
ENDNOTES      195  ^^ 

INDEX       233 


Hello  hello/I'm  at  a  place  called  Vertigo/It's  everything  I  wish  I  didn't  know 

— U2,  "Vertigo"  (2004) 


On  one  occasion  she  asked  if  I  was  a  journalist  or  writer.  When  I  said  that  neither 
the  one  nor  the  other  was  quite  right,  she  asked  what  it  was  that  I  was  working  on,  to 
which  I  replied  that  I  did  not  know  for  certain  myself,  but  had  a  growing  suspicion 
that  it  might  turn  into  a  crime  story . . .  ^  — W.  G.  Sebald,  Vertigo  (1990) 


One  final  thing  I  have  to  do  and  then  I'll  be  free  of  the  past One  doesn't  often  get 

a  second  chance.  I  want  to  stop  being  haunted.  You're  my  second  chance,  Judy, 
You're  my  second  chance.        — Alec  Coppel  and  Samuel  A.  Taylor,  Vertigo  (1958) 


INTRODUCTION 

HYPERVISIBILITY 

@alexia:  We  would  have  lived  our  lives  differently  if  we  had  known 
they  would  one  day  be  searchable. ' 


A  Man  Who  Is  His  Own  Image 

Alfred  Hitchcock,  who  always  referred  to  movies  as  "pictures,"  once  said  that 
behind  every  good  picture  lay  a  great  corpse.  Hitchcock,  an  old  master  at 
resurrecting  the  dead  in  pictures  like  Vertigo,  his  creepy  1958  movie  about  a 
man's  love  affair  with  a  corpse,  was  right.  The  truth  is  a  great  corpse  makes 
such  a  ^006. picture  that  it  can  even  help  bring  a  nonfiction  book  like  this  to 
life. 

Behind  this  book  sits  the  most  visible  corpse  of  the  nineteenth  century — 
the  body  of  the  utilitarian  philosopher,  social  reformer  and  prison  architect 
Jeremy  Bentham,  a  cadaver  that  has  been  living  in  public  since  his  death  in 
June  1832.^  Seeking  to  immortalize  his  own  reputation  as  what  he  called 
a  "benefactor  of  the  human  race,"  Bentham  bequeathed  both  his  body  and 
"Dapple,"  his  favorite  walking  stick,  to  London's  University  College  and 
instructed  that  they  should  be  permanently  exhibited  inside  a  glass-fronted 
wooden  coffin  he  coined  an  "Auto-Icon" — a  neologism  meaning  "a  man 
who  is  his  own  image."^ 

His  greed  for  attention  is  today  on  permanent  exhibition  inside  a  public 
coffin  whose  size,  Brave  New  World  author  Aldous  Huxley  once  estimated, 


ANDREW  KEEN 


is  larger  than  a  telephone  booth  but  smaller  than  an  outdoor  toilet.'*  Today, 
he  and  Dapple  now  sit  in  a  corridor  in  the  South  Cloisters  of  University 
College's  main  Bloomsbury  building  on  Gower  Street,  strategically  situated 
so  that  they  can  be  observed  by  all  passing  traffic  on  this  bustling  metro- 
politan campus.  Bentham,  who  believed  himself  to  be  "the  most  effectively 
benevolent"  person  who  ever  lived,^  is  now  therefore  never  alone.  He  has,  so 
to  speak,  eliminated  his  own  loneliness. 

The  idea  behind  this  book  first  came  to  life  in  that  London  corridor. 
There  I  serendipitously  found  myself  one  recent  drizzly  November  afternoon, 
a  Research  In  Motion  (RIM)  BlackBerry  smartphone^  in  one  hand  and  a 
Canon  digital  camera'^  in  the  other,  looking  at  the  Auto-Icon.  But  the  longer 
I  stared  at  the  creepy  Jeremy  Bentham  imprisoned  inside  his  fame  machine, 
the  more  I  suspected  that  our  identities  had,  in  fact,  merged.  You  see,  like 
the  solitary  utilitarian  who'd  been  on  public  display  throughout  the  indus- 
trial age,  I'd  become  little  more  than  a  corpse  on  perpetual  display  in  a  trans- 
parent box. 

Yes,  like  Jeremy  Bentham,  I'd  gone  somewhere  else  entirely.  I  was  in  a 
place  called  social  media,  that  permanent  self-exhibition  zone  of  our  new 
digital  age  where,  via  my  BlackBerry  Bold  and  the  other  more  than  5  billion 
devices  now  in  our  hands, ^  we  are  collectively  publishing  mankind's  group 
portrait  in  motion.  This  place  is  built  upon  a  network  of  increasingly  intelli- 
gent and  mobile  electronic  products  that  are  connecting  everyone  on  the 
planet  through  services  like  Facebook,  Twitter,  Google -I-,  and  Linkedln. 
Rather  than  virtual  or  second  life,  social  media  is  actually  becoming  life 
itself— the  central  and  increasingly  transparent  stage  of  human  existence, 
what  Silicon  Valley  venture  capitalists  are  now  calling  an  "internet  of  people."^ 
As  the  fictionalized  version  of  Facebook  president  Sean  Parker — played 
with  such  panache  by  Justin  Timberlake — predicted  in  the  2010  Oscar- 
nominated  movie  The  Social  Network-.  "We  lived  in  farms,  then  we  lived 
in  cities,  and  now  we're  gonna  live  on  the  Internet!"  Social  media  is,  thus, 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  3 

like  home;  it  is  the  architecture  in  which  we  now  live.  There  is  even  a 
community  newspaper  called  The  Daily  Dot  that  is  the  paper  of  record 
for  the  Wch}^ 

Crouching  in  front  of  the  mahogany  Auto-Icon,  I  adjusted  the  lens  of  my 
camera  upon  Bentham,  zooming  in  so  that  I  could  intimately  inspect  his 
beady  eyes,  the  wide  brimmed  tan  hat  covering  his  shoulder  length  gray 
hair,  the  white  ruffled  shirt  and  black  rustic  jacket  clothing  his  dissected 
torso,  and  Dapple  resting  in  his  gloved  hand.  Shifting  my  camera  toward  his 
waxen  face,  I  looked  the  dead  Englishman  as  closely  in  the  eye  as  my  prying 
technology  would  allow.  I  was  searching  for  the  private  man  behind  the 
public  corpse.  What,  I  wanted  to  know,  had  led  "The  Hermit  of  Queen's 
Square  Place,"^^  as  Bentham  liked  to  call  himself,  best  known  for  his  "great- 
est happiness  principle"  that  human  beings  are  defined  by  their  desire  to 
maximize  their  pleasure  and  minimize  their  pain,^^  to  prefer  the  eternal 
glare  of  public  exposure  over  the  everlasting  privacy  of  the  grave? 

In  my  other  hand  I  held  my  BlackBerry  Bold,  RIM's  pocket-sized  device 
that,  by  broadcasting  my  location,  my  observations  and  my  intentions  to  my 
electronic  network,  enabled  me  to  perpetually  live  in  public.  My  social  me- 
dia obligations  nagged  at  me.  As  a  Silicon  Valley  based  networker,  my  job — 
both  then  and  now — is  grabbing  other  people's  attention  on  Twitter  and 
Facebook  so  that  I  can  become  ubiquitous.  I  am  an  influencer,  a  wannabe 
Jeremy  Bentham — what  futurists  call  a  "Super  Node"  — the  vanguard  of  the 
workforce  that,  they  predict,  will  increasingly  come  to  dominate  the  twenty- 
first-century  digital  economy.^^  So  that  afternoon,  like  every  afternoon  in  my 
reputation-building  life,  I  really  needed  to  be  the  picture  on  everyone's  screen. 

Not  that  anyone,  either  on  or  ofTmy  social  network,  knew  my  exact  loca- 
tion that  November  afternoon.  I  happened  to  be  in  central  London  for  a  few 
hours,  in  transit  between  one  social  media  conference  in  Oxford  that  had 
just  finished  and  another  that  would  begin  the  following  afternoon  in  Am- 
sterdam, near  the  Rijksmuseum,  the  art  museum  that  houses  many  of  the 


4  ANDREW  KEEN 

most  timeless  pictures  of  the  human  condition  by  Dutch  seventeenth-century 
artists  Uke  Johannes  Vermeer  and  Rembrandt  van  Rijn. 

But,  in  London,  my  interest  lay  in  the  living  metropolis,  what  the  Anglo- 
American  writer  Jonathan  Raban  calls  the  "soft  city"  of  permanent  personal 
reinvention,  rather  than  in  pictures  by  dead  artists.  It  was  my  day  off  from 
the  glare  of  public  speaking,  my  opportunity  to  briefly  escape  from  society 
and  be  left  alone  in  a  city  where  I'd  been  born  and  educated  but  no  longer 
lived.  As  the  nineteenth-century  German  sociologist  Georg  Simmel  wrote, 
the  city  "grants  to  the  individual  a  kind  and  an  amount  of  personal  freedom 
which  has  no  analogy  whatever  under  any  other  conditions." ^"^  My  illegibil- 
ity that  afternoon  thus  represented  my  liberty.  Freedom  meant  nobody 
knowing  exactly  where  I  was. 

"To  live  in  a  city  is  to  live  in  a  community  of  people  who  are  strangers  to 
each  other,"^^  writes  Raban  about  the  freedom  of  living  in  a  large  city.  And 
I'd  certainly  spent  that  chilly  November  afternoon  as  a  stranger  lost  amidst 
a  community  of  disconnected  strangers,  zigzagging  through  London's  crooked 
streets,  hopping  on  and  off  buses  and  trains,  stopping  here  and  there  to  re- 
explore  familiar  places,  reminding  myself  about  how  the  city  had  imprinted 
itself  on  my  personality. 

Eventually,  as  so  often  one  does  while  wandering  through  London,  I  hap- 
pened to  find  myself  in  the  Bloomsbury  neighborhood  where,  some  thirty 
years  earlier,  I  had  attended  university  as  a  student  of  modern  history.  There, 
I  strolled  through  Senate  House — the  forbiddingly  monolithic  building 
which  had  housed  my  college  and  which  was  the  model,  it  is  said,  for  George 
Orwell's  Ministry  of  Truth  in  Nineteen  Eighty-four^^ — before  wandering 
up  Gower  Street  toward  Jeremy  Bentham's  corpse  in  University  College. 

©Quixotic 

I  had  come  to  London  that  morning  from  Oxford,  where  I'd  spent  the  pre- 
vious few  days  at  a  conference  entitled  "Silicon  Valley  Comes  to  Oxford." 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  5 

This  was  an  event  organized  by  the  university's  Said  Business  School  in 
which  Silicon  Valley's  most  influential  entrepreneurs  had  come  to  the  closed, 
haunted  city  of  Oxford  to  celebrate  the  openness  and  transparency  of  social 
life  in  the  twenty-first  century. 

At  Oxford,  I'd  debated  Reid  Hoffman,  the  multibillionaire  founder  of 
Linkedin  and  Silicon  Valley's  most  prodigious  progenitor  of  online  net- 
works, a  brilliant  social  media  visionary  known  as  @quixotic  to  his  Twitter 
followers.  "When  I  graduated  from  Stanford  my  plan  was  to  become  a  pro- 
fessor and  public  intellectual,"  Hoffman  once  confessed.  "That  is  not  about 
quoting  Kant.  It's  about  holding  up  a  lens  to  society  and  asking  who  are 
we?'  and  who  should  we  be,  as  individuals  and  a  society?'  But  I  realised  aca- 
demics write  books  that  50  or  60  people  read  and  I  wanted  more  impact."^^ 

To  get  more  impact,  Reid  Hoffman  dramatically  magnified  the  lens  with 
which  we  look  at  society.  Instead  of  writing  books  for  fifty  or  sixty  people,  he 
created  a  social  network  for  100  million  people  that  is  now  growing  by  a  mil- 
lion new  members  every  ten  days.^^  Today,  a  new  person  joins  Linkedin  every 
second^^ — meaning  that  in  the  time  it's  taken  you  to  read  this  paragraph, 
@quixotic  has  had  an  impact  on  another  50  or  60  people  around  the  world. 

No,  a  Don  Quixote  tilting  at  windmills  he  certainly  isn't.  Indeed,  if  social 
media — what  @quixotic  has  dubbed  "Web  3.0"^^ — has  a  founding  father,  it 
might  be  Hoffman,  the  suitably  cherubic  looking  early-stage  "angel"  inves- 
tor who  San  Francisco  Magazine  identified  as  one  of  Silicon  Valley's  most 
powerful  "archangels,"^^  Forbes  ranked  third  in  their  2011  Midas  List^^  of 
the  world's  most  successful  technology  investors.  The  Wall  Street  Journal 
described  as  "the  most  connected  person  in  Silicon  Valley"^^  and  The  New 
York  Times  crowned,  in  November  2011,  as  the  "king  of  connections."^"* 

The  Oxford-  and  Stanford-educated  entrepreneur,  now  a  partner  in  the 
venture  capital  firm  of  Greylock  Partners  and  a  multibillionaire  both  in  terms 
of  his  dollar  net  worth  and  his  global  network  of  business  and  political  rela- 
tionships, saw  the  social  future  before  almost  anyone  else.^^  "Looking  back 


ANDREW  KEEN 


on  my  life  I've  come  to  realize  that  what  I  am  most  driven  by  is  building, 
designing  and  improving  human  ecosystems,"  Hoffman  confessed  in  Janu- 
ary 2011.^^  And,  as  an  architect  of  "prime  human  ecosystem"  real  estate  for 
the  twenty-first  century,  @quixotic  has  become  one  of  the  wealthiest  and 
most  powerful  men  on  earth.  Grasping  the  Internet's  shift  from  a  platform 
for  data  to  one  for  real  people,  Hoffman  not  only  started  the  very  first  con- 
temporary social  media  business  back  in  1997 — a  dating  service  called 
SocialNet — but  also  was  an  angel  investor  in  Friendster  and  Facebook  as 
well  as  the  founder,  the  original  CEO  and  the  current  Executive  Chairman 
of  Linkedin,  America's  second  most  highly  trafficked  social  network^^ 
whose  May  201 1  initial  public  offering  was,  at  the  time,  the  largest  technol- 
ogy IPO  since  Google's  in  2004.^^ 

"The  future  is  always  sooner  and  stranger  than  you  think,"  Hoffman,  who 
became  an  overnight  multibillionaire  after  Linkedln's  meteoric  IPO,  once 
remarked.^^  But  even  (2)quixotic,  back  in  1997  when  he  founded  SocialNet, 
couldn't  have  quite  imagined  how  quickly  he  would  come  to  own  that  fu- 
ture. You  see,  six  years  later,  in  2003,  Hoffman — in  partnership  with  his 
friend  Mark  Pincus,  another  Silicon  Valley  based  social  media  pioneer  who 
cofounded  Tribe.net  and  is  now  the  CEO  of  the  multibillion-doUar  gaming 
network  Zynga^^ — paid  $700,000  in  auction  for  an  intellectual  patent  on 
social  networking,  thereby  making  this  plutocratic  polymath  the  co-owner, 
in  a  sense,  of  the  future  itself 

The  formal  subject  of  my  Oxford  debate  with  Hoffman  had  been 
whether  social  media  communities  would  replace  the  nation-state  as  the 
source  of  personal  identity  in  the  twenty-first  century.  But  the  real  heart  of 
our  conversation — indeed,  the  central  theme  of  the  whole  "Silicon  Valley 
Comes  to  Oxford"  event — had  been  the  question  of  whether  digital  man 
would  be  more  socially  connected  than  his  industrial  ancestor.  In  contrast 
with  my  own  ambivalence  about  the  social  benefits  of  the  virtual  world, 
Hoffman  dreamt  openly  about  the  potential  of  today's  networking  revolu- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO 


tion  to  bring  us  together.  The  shift  from  a  society  built  upon  atoms  to  one 
built  upon  bytes,  the  archangel  publicly  insisted  at  our  Oxford  debate,  would 
make  us  more  connected  and  thus  more  socially  united  as  human  beings. 

In  private,  the  affable,  and  I  have  to  admit,  the  very  likeable  Hoffman 
was  equally  committed  to  this  social  ideal.  "But  what  about  people  who 
don't  want  to  be  on  the  network?"  I  asked  him  as  we  ate  breakfast  together 
on  the  morning  of  our  debate. 

"Huh?" 

"Let's  face  it,  Reid,  some  people  just  don't  want  to  be  connected." 

"Don't  want  to  he  connected^'  the  billionaire  muttered  under  his  breath. 
Such  was  the  incredulity  clouding  his  cherubic  face  that,  for  a  moment,  I 
feared  I  had  ruined  his  breakfast  of  grilled  kippers  and  scrambled  eggs. 

"Yes,"  I  confirmed.  "Some  people  simply  want  to  be  let  alone." 

I  have  to  confess  that  my  point  lacked  originality.  I  was  simply  repeating 
the  concerns  of  privacy  advocates  like  the  legal  scholars  Samuel  Warren  and 
Louis  Brandeis  who,  in  1890,  wrote  their  now  timeless  "The  Right  to  Pri- 
vacy" Harvard  Law  Review  article  which,  in  reaction  to  the  then  nascent 
mass  media  technologies  of  photography  and  newspapers,  had  defined  pri- 
vacy as  "the  right  of  the  individual  to  be  let  alone." ^' 

It  may  have  been  a  recycled  nineteenth-century  remark,  but  at  least  I'd 
expressed  it  in  a  recycled  nineteenth-century  environment.  Reid  Hoffman 
and  I  were  eating  our  kippers  and  eggs  in  the  basement  "Destination  Bras- 
serie" of  Oxford's  Malmaison  hotel,  once  a  nineteenth-century  prison  built 
by  a  disciple  of  Jeremy  Bentham's  architectural  theories  about  surveillance 
and  now  reinvented  as  a  chic  twenty-first-century  hotel  distinguished  by  its 
cell-style  bedrooms  that  featured  the  original  caste  iron  doors  and  bars  of 
the  old  house  of  correction. ^^ 

"After  all,  Reid,"  I  added,  as  I  glanced  around  the  prison's  former  solitary 
confinement  cells  that  were  now  dotted  with  individual  diners,  "some  people 
prefer  solitude  to  connectivity." 


ANDREW  KEEN 


(2)quixotic  finished  a  mouthful  of  eggs  and  fish  before  countering  with 
some  recycled  wisdom  of  his  own.  But  whereas  I'd  quoted  a  couple  of 
nineteenth-century  American  legal  scholars,  Hoffman — who,  as  a  Marshall 
Scholar  at  Oxford  during  the  eighties,  had  earned  a  masters  degree  in 
philosophy — went  back  even  further  in  history,  back  to  the  ancient  Greeks 
of  the  fifi:h  century  B.C.,  to  Aristotle,  the  founding  father  of  communitari- 
anism  and  the  most  influential  philosopher  of  the  medieval  period. 

"You  have  to  remember,"  @quixotic  said,  borrowing  some  very  familiar 
words  from  Aristotle's  Politics,  "that  man  is,  by  nature,  a  social  animal."^^ 

The  Future  Will  Be  Social 

Reid  Hoffman  certainly  hadn't  been  alone  in  recycling  this  pre-modern 
faith  that  the  social  is  hardwired  into  all  of  us.  All  the  Silicon  Valley 
grandees  who  came  to  Oxford  and  who,  like  Hoffman  and  I,  were  staying 
in  the  reinvented  prison — Internet  moguls  like  Twitter  co-founder  Biz 
Stone,  heavyweight  investor  Chris  Sacca,^'^  Second  Life  founder  Philip 
Rosedale,  and  the  technology  journalist  Mike  Malone,  the  so-called  "Bo- 
swell  of  Silicon  Valley" — had  embraced  this  same  Aristotelian  ideal  of  our 
natural  sociability.  But  whereas  these  architects  of  our  social  future 
seemed  to  possess  all  the  answers  about  this  connected  future,  my  mind 
was  filled  only  with  questions  about  where  we  were  going  and  how  we  would 
get  there. 

"So,  Biz,  what  exactly  is  the  future?"^^  I  had  asked  Stone  one  evening  as, 
by  chance,  we  found  ourselves  next  to  one  another  in  the  crowded  and  noisy 
old  dining  hall  of  Balliol  College,  the  Oxford  College  founded  in  1263  by 
John  Balliol,  one  of  the  most  visible  men  of  medieval  England,  a  feudal  land- 
owner so  powerful  that  he  had  his  own  private  army  of  several  thousand 
loyal  followers. 

This  was  no  idle  question.  Given  his  significant  ownership  stake  in  Twit- 
ter, Biz  Stone — who,  as  @biz,  has  almost  2  million  loyal  followers  in  his 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  9 

network — is  one  of  the  most  powerful  virtual  landowners  of  our  age,  a  veri- 
table John  Balliol  of  the  twenty- first  century,  an  information  baron  who 
knows  everything  about  all  of  us. 

"Biz  not  only  knows  what  everyone  is  thinking,"  Jerry  Sanders,  the  CEO 
of  San  Francisco  Scientific  said  of  Stone  at  Oxford  during  a  Union  debate 
about  whether  we  should  trust  entrepreneurs  with  our  future,  "but  also 
where  it  is  that  they  are  thinking  what  they  are  thinking."^^ 

I  thus  valued  Stone's  opinion.  If  anybody  could  see  the  future,  it  was  this 
all-knowing  Silicon  Valley  magnate,  the  co-founder  of  the  ever-expanding 
short-messaging  social  network  which,  with  its  multibillion  valuation^'^  and 
its  more  than  two  hundred  million  registered  users  sending  more  than  140 
million  tweets  each  day,^^  is  revolutionizing  the  architecture  of  twenty- 
first-century  communications. 

Stone — a  lifelong  social  media  evangelist  and  author^^  who,  in  addition 
to  his  current  daytime  gig  as  a  venture  capitalist,'^^  moonlights  for  his  friend 
Arianna  Huffington  as  AOL's  Strategic  Advisor  for  Social  Impact"^^ — leant 
toward  me  so  that  I  could  hear  him  above  the  conversational  chatter  on  the 
communal  wooden  benches.  "The  future,"  @biz  said,  sharing  his  thought 
with  Twitter-like  brevity.  "The  future  will  be  social." 

"The  killer  app,  eh?"  I  replied,  trying — not  very  effectively,  I  suspect — to 
emulate  both  his  terseness  and  profundity. 

Stone,  a  cheeky-looking  chappie  with  chunky  black  glasses  and  a  geeky 
mop  of  hair,  grinned.  But  even  this  grin  was  ail-knowingly  brief  "That's 
right,"  he  confirmed.  "The  social  will  be  the  killer  app  of  the  twenty-first 
century." 

Biz  Stone  was  correct.  At  Oxford,  I  had  come  to  understand  that  the 
social — which  meant  the  sharing  of  our  personal  information,  our  location, 
our  taste  and  our  identities  on  Internet  networks  like  Twitter,  Linkedin, 
Google  -f  and  Facebook — was  the  Internet's  newest  new  thing.  Every  new 
social  platform,  social  service,  social  app,  social  page,  I  learnt,  was  becoming  a 


10  ANDREW  KEEN 

piece  of  this  new  social  media  world — from  i^fd^/ journalism  to  social  entre- 
preneurship  to  social  commerce  to  social  production  to  social  learning  to  so- 
aW charity  to  social  c-n\z\\  to  i^aW gaming  to  social csipita.\  to  5<?ai^/ television 
to  social  consumption  to  social  consumers  on  the  "social  graph,"  an  algo- 
rithm that  supposedly  maps  out  each  of  our  unique  social  networks.  And 
given  that  the  Internet  was  becoming  the  connective  tissue  of  twenty-first- 
century  life,  the  future — our  future,  yours  and  mine  and  everyone  else  on 
the  ubiquitous  network — would,  therefore,  be,  yes  you  guessed  it,  social. 

But  as  I  stood  alone  in  that  bustling  London  corridor  gaping  at  the  dead 
Jeremy  Bentham,  the  truth  was  that  I  felt  anything  but  social — especially 
with  this  nineteenth-century  corpse.  In  my  eagerness  to  inspect  the  de- 
ceased social  reformer,  I'd  gotten  so  close  to  the  Auto-Icon  that  I  was  almost 
touching  its  glass  front.  Yet  Bentham's  great  exhibitionism  remained  a  mys- 
tery to  me.  I  just  couldn't  figure  out  why  he  would  want  to  be  seen  by  a 
never-ending  procession  of  strangers,  all  peering  into  his  beady  eyes  to  exca- 
vate the  human  being  behind  the  corpse. 

I  was  searching  for  wisdom  from  old  Jeremy  Bentham,  some  special  in- 
sight that  would  illuminate  the  human  condition  for  me.  Yes,  the  likeness  of 
the  Auto-Icon  to  the  real  Bentham  was  genuine — a  similarity  his  friend 
Lord  Brougham  described  as  "so  perfect  that  it  seems  as  if  alive.'"*^  And  yet 
the  harder  I  stared  at  his  corpse,  the  less  I  could  see  of  what  made  him  human. 

From  my  days  as  a  student  of  modern  history,  I  remembered  John  Stuart 
Mill's  dismissive  remarks  about  the  utilitarian  philosopher.  "Bentham's 
knowledge  of  human  nature  is  bounded,"  wrote  Mill,  Bentham's  legal 
guardian^^  and  greatest  acolyte,  who  later  became  his  most  acute  critic.  "It  is 
wholly  empirical,  and  the  empiricism  of  one  who  has  had  little  experience."^'^ 

John  Stuart  Mill,  England's  most  influential  thinker  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  thought  of  Bentham  as  a  sort  of  human  computer,  able  to  add  up 
our  appetites  and  fears  but  incapable  of  grasping  anything  beyond  the  strictly 
empirical  about  what  makes  us  human.  "How  much  of  human  nature  slum- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  11 

bered  in  him  he  knew  not,  neither  can  we  know,"  Mill — who  popularized 
the  word  "utilitarian'"^^ — wrote  of  his  former  mentor.  The  problem  with 
Bentham,  Mill  recognized,  was  that,  as  somebody  who  was  deficient  in  both 
the  imagination  and  experience  required  to  grasp  the  human  condition,  "he 
was  a  boy  to  the  last.'"^^ 

So  if  the  boy  Bentham  couldn't  teach  me  about  human  nature,  I  won- 
dered, then  who  could? 

I  Update,  Therefore  I  Am 

It  occurred  to  me  that  the  corpse  might  make  more  human  sense  after  I'd 
expressed  myself  about  it  on  Biz  Stone's  Twitter  where,  as  @ajkeen,  I  had  a 
following  of  several  thousand  followers.  Squeezing  the  rectangular  Black- 
Berry  between  my  fingers,  I  wondered  how  to  socially  produce  my  confusion 
about  Bentham  in  under  140  characters.  Turning  away  from  the  Auto-Icon, 
I  noticed  that  the  University  College  corridor  was  thronged  with  students 
walking  to  and  from  their  afternoon  classes.  As  I  watched  this  procession  of 
strangers  trooping  across  the  Bloomsbury  campus,  I  saw  that  some  of  them 
were  glancing  at  me  queerly,  perhaps  in  a  similarly  foreign  way  to  how  I  was 
peering  at  Bentham's  corpse.  What  impression,  I  wondered,  did  these  stu- 
dents have  of  me — this  globally  networked  yet  entirely  solitary  stranger  from 
another  continent,  determinedly  anonymous  in  the  metropolis,  gazing  with 
a  detached  intimacy  at  a  pre-Victorian  corpse. 

My  confusion  about  the  dead  social  reformer  drifted  into  a  confusion 
about  my  own  identity.  Instead  of  contemplating  Bentham's  exhibitionism, 
I  began  to  consider  my  own  personality  in  the  order  of  things.  How,  I  won- 
dered, could  I  prove  my  own  existence  to  my  prized  army  of  followers  on 
Twitter,  the  vast  majority  of  whom  neither  knew  nor  would  ever  know  me? 

Rather  than  using  Twitter  to  broadcast  my  thoughts  about  the  Auto- 
Icon  or  to  confess  what  I'd  had  for  breakfast  that  day  (grilled  kippers 
again — eaten  at  the  chic  Oxford  prison)  or  to  tell  the  world  about  my  plans 


12  ANDREW  KEEN 

lo  look  at  the  pictures  in  Amsterdam's  Rijksmuseum  the  following  day, 
I  went  all  Cartesian  on  my  global  audience. 

I  UPDATE,  THEREFORE  I  AM,  I  thumbed  onto  "Tweetie,"  an  ap- 
plication on  my  BlackBerry  Bold  that  enabled  me  to  send  a  tweet  anytime 
from  anywhere. 

These  twenty-four  characters  of  digital  wisdom  blinked  back  at  me  from 
the  screen,  impatient,  it  seemed,  to  be  pushed  out  onto  the  network  for  the 
world  to  see.  But  my  thumb  hovered  over  the  BlackBerry 's  send  button.  I 
wasn't  ready  to  publish  this  private  thought  out  onto  the  public  network. 
Not  yet  anyway.  I  glanced  down  at  my  screen  once  again. 

@ajkeen:  I  UPDATE,  THEREFORE  I  AM 

If  these  words  were  really  true,  I  asked  myself,  then  what?  Would  the  entire 
world,  all  eight  billion  human  beings,  have  to  migrate — like  settlers  in  a 
promised  social  media  land — onto  this  new  central  nervous  system  of  soci- 
ety? What,  I  wondered,  would  be  the  fate  of  our  identities  when  we  all  lived 
without  secrets,  fully  transparent,  completely  in  public,  within  the  social  ar- 
chitecture that  Reid  Hoffman  and  Biz  Stone  were  building  for  the  rest  of 
humanity?  I  looked  again  at  the  dead  Bentham,  the  utilitarian  father  of  the 
greatest-happiness  principle.  Would  this  electronically  networked  society 
result  in  more  happiness?  I  contemplated.  Would  it  lead  to  the  improvement 
of  the  human  condition?  Would  it  enrich  our  personalities?  Could  it  create 
man  in  his  own  image? 

Questions,  questions,  questions.  My  mind  drifted  to  the  unwired,  to 
those  unwilling  or  unable  to  live  in  public.  The  thought  triggered  a  feeling 
of  dizziness,  as  if  the  external  world  had  speeded  up  and  was  now  revolving 
quicker  and  quicker  around  me.  If,  as  the  fictional  Sean  Parker  argues  in  The 
Social  Network.,  our  future  will  be  lived  online,  I  thought  to  myself,  then 
what  will  be  the  fate  of  these  dissenters,  of  those  who  don't  update?  What, 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  13 

I  wondered,  in  a  world  in  which  we  all  exist  on  the  Internet,  will  become  of 
those  who  protect  their  privacy,  who  pride  themselves  on  their  illegibility, 
who — in  the  timeless  words  of  Brandeis  and  Warren — just  want  to  be  let 
alonet 

Will  they  be  alive,  I  wondered,  or  will  they  be  dead? 

The  Living  and  the  Dead 

My  tweet  still  unsent,  I  continued  to  gaze  into  the  Auto-Icon  for  enlighten- 
ment. As  the  picture  became  clearer  and  clearer,  my  dizziness  intensified 
and  the  room  began  to  spin  around  me  with  more  and  more  violence.  Yes,  I 
now  saw,  Bentham's  corpse  did,  after  all,  have  something  to  teach  me.  The 
true  picture  of  the  future,  I  realized,  had  been  staring  me  straight  in  the  face 
all  along. 

In  spite  of  my  own  feeling  of  vertigo,  this  vision — a  painful  kind  of 
epiphany — grabbed  me  with  an  icy  clarity.  I  froze  momentarily,  my  mouth 
half  open,  my  eyes  fixed  on  the  corpse.  It  suddenly  became  clear  that  I'd  been 
peering  into  a  mirror.  Reid  Hoffman  was  right:  the  future  is  always  sooner 
and  stranger  than  anyone  of  us  think.  I  realized  that  the  Auto-Icon,  this 
"man  who  is  his  own  image,"  represents  this  future  and  Bentham's  corpse  is 
actually  you,  me  and  everyone  else  who  have  imprisoned  themselves  in  to- 
day's digital  inspection  house. 

What  I  glimpsed  that  late  November  afternoon  in  Bloomsbury  was  the 
anti-social  ^utuvc,  the  loneliness  of  the  isolated  man  in  the  connected  crowd. 
I  saw  all  of  us  as  digital  Jeremy  Benthams,  isolated  from  one  another  not 
only  by  the  growing  ubiquity  of  networked  communications,  but  also  by  the 
increasingly  individualized  and  competitive  nature  of  twenty-first-century 
life.  Yes,  this  was  the  future.  Personal  visibility,  I  recognized,  is  the  new  sym- 
bol of  status  and  power  in  our  digital  age.  Like  the  corpse  locked  in  his  trans- 
parent tomb,  we  are  now  all  on  permanent  exhibition,  all  just  images  of 
ourselves  in  this  brave  new  transparent  world. 


ANDREW  KEEN 


Like  the  immodest  nineteenth-century  social  reformer  locked  in  his 
eternal  wooden  and  glass  box,  we  twenty-first-century  social  networkers — 
especially  aspiring  super  nodes  like  myself — are  becoming  addicted  to 
building  attention  and  reputation.  But  like  the  solitariness  of  my  own  expe- 
rience in  that  University  College  corridor,  the  truth,  the  reality  of  social 
media,  is  an  architecture  of  human  isolation  rather  than  community.  The 
future  will  be  anything  but  social,  I  realized.  That's  the  real  killer  app  of  the 
networked  age. 

We  are,  I  realized,  becoming  schizophrenic — simultaneously  detached 
from  the  world  and  yet  jarringly  ubiquitous.  Cultural  critics  like  Umberto 
Eco  and  Jean  Baudrillard  have  used  the  word  "hyperreality"  to  describe  how 
modern  technology  blurs  the  distinction  between  reality  and  unreality  and 
grants  authenticity  to  self-evidently  fake  things  like  William  Randolph 
Hearst's  castle  in  San  Simeon,  the  gothic  building  on  the  Californian  coast 
made  famous  by  Orson  Wells's  1941  picture  Citizen  Kane.  Eco  defines  hyper- 
reality as  "a  philosophy  of  immortality  as  duplication"  where  "the  completely 
r^/«/ becomes  identified  with  the  completely  fake!"^^ 

"Absolute  unreality  is  offered  as  real  presence,"  Eco  thus  explains  hyperreal- 
ity. But  as  I  gazed  at  the  Auto-Icon,  an  equally  absurd  neologism  came  to  mind: 
"hypervisibility."  The  man  who  is  his  own  image  in  the  digitally  networked 
world,  I  realized,  is  simultaneously  everywhere  and  nowhere,  and  the  more 
completely  visible  he  appears,  the  more  completely  invisible  he  actually  is. 

Hypervisibility. 

In  this  fully  transparent  world  where  we  are  simultaneously  nowhere  and 
everywhere,  absolute  unreality  is  real  presence,  and  the  completely  fake  is 
also  the  completely  real.  This,  I  saw,  was  the  most  truthfully  untruthful  pic- 
ture of  networked  twenty-first-century  life. 

Now  I  was  ready  to  broadcast  my  tweet.  Yet  before  pressing  send,  I  added 
a  word  to  the  short  message  still  blinking  on  my  BlackBerry.  It  was  a  single 
word,  just  three  characters  out  of  Twitter's  140-character  limit,  but  it  trans- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  15 

formed  the  tweet  from  a  hopeful  expression  of  digital  cartesianism  into  a 
chillingly  existential  plea. 

@ajkeen:  I  UPDATE,  THEREFORE  I  AM  NOT 

But  the  RIM  electronic  device  wasn't  called  a  smartphone  for  nothing.  I  had 
been  wrong  that  nobody  knew  my  location  that  afternoon.  As  I  was  about  to 
send  my  tweet,  an  uninvited  message  from  Tweetie  popped  up  on  the  screen. 
It  was  a  request  to  give  out  my  Bloomsbury  location,  so  that  the  app  could 
broadcast  where  I  was  to  my  thousands  of  Twitter  followers. 

TWEETIE  WOULD  LIKE  TO  USE  YOUR  CURRENT  LOCATION— 
DON'T  ALLOW  or  OK 

The  BlackBerry  device,  I  realized,  wanted  to  betray  me  by  broadcasting 
my  location  to  the  world.  No  wonder  it  was  made  by  Research  in  Motion. 
Switching  off  the  smartphone  and  shoving  it  deep  into  my  trouser  pocket,  I 
took  a  deep  breath,  then  another.  The  silence  was  symphonic.  As  my  dizzi- 
ness retreated,  I  thought  again  about  my  conversations  in  Oxford  the  previ- 
ous day  with  @quixotic,  the  co-owner  of  our  collective  future.  I  realized 
that  he  had  been  both  right  and  wrong  about  the  future.  Yes,  there  is  no 
doubt  that,  for  better  or  worse,  nineteenth-  and  twentieth-century  indus- 
trial atoms  are  now  being  replaced  by  twenty-first-century  networked  bytes. 
But  no,  rather  than  uniting  us  between  the  digital  pillars  of  an  Aristotelian 
polls,  today's  social  media  is  actually  splintering  our  identities  so  that  we  al- 
ways exist  outside  ourselves,  unable  to  concentrate  on  the  here-and-now,  too 
wedded  to  our  own  image,  perpetually  revealing  our  current  location,  our 
privacy  sacrificed  to  the  utilitarian  tyranny  of  a  collective  network. 

History,  I  realized,  was  repeating  itself  In  1890,  nearly  sixty  years  afi:er 
Jeremy  Bentham's  body  first  made  its  public  appearance  in  University 


16  ANDREW  KEEN 

College,  Samuel  Warren  and  Louis  Brandeis  argued  in  their  iconic  Harvard 
Law  Review  article  that  "solitude  and  privacy  have  become  more  essential  to 
the  individual."  The  right  to  be  let  alone,  Warren  and  Brandeis  wrote  in  "De- 
fense of  Privacy,"  was  a  "general  right  to  the  immunity  of  the  person  . . .  the 
right  to  one's  personality."  And  today,  at  the  dawn  of  our  increasingly  trans- 
parent social  media  age,  more  than  a  century  after  the  law  review  article  first 
appeared,  this  need  for  solitude  and  privacy — the  primary  ingredients  in  the 
mysterious  formation  of  individual  personality — has,  if  anything,  become 
even  more  essential. 

Vertigo,  Alfred  Hitchcock's  creepy  picture  about  a  man's  love  for  a  corpse, 
was  based  upon  the  French  novel  The  Living  and  the  Dead}^  But  there  is 
nothing  fictional  about  today's  creeping  auto-iconization  of  life  and  its  tragic 
consequence — the  death  of  privacy  and  solitude  in  our  social  networking 
world.  It  was  Hitchcock,  I  think,  who  once  joked  that  the  corpse  he  most 
feared  seeing  was  his  own.  Yet  it's  no  joke  if  that  corpse  also  happens  to  be  the 
corpse  of  mankind,  exiled  not  only  from  himself,  but  also  from  everyone  else, 
billions  of  people  who  are  their  own  images  whizzing  faster  and  faster  around 
each  other  on  the  transparent  network,  hypervisible,  all  perpetually  on  show, 
imprisoned  in  an  endless  loop  of  great  exhibitionism,  greedy  for  attention, 
building  their  self-proclaimed  reputations  as  benefactors  of  the  human  race. 

For  Jeremy  Bentham  and  his  utilitarian  school,  happiness  is  a  mathemati- 
cal equation  simply  quantifiable  by  substracting  our  pain  from  our  pleasures. 
But  this  utilitarian  philosophy — so  savagely  satirized  by  Charles  Dickens  in 
the  ridiculous  form  of  Mr.  Gradgrind  in  Hard  Times — fails  to  grasp  what 
makes  us  human.  As  Dickens,  John  Stuart  Mill  and  many  more  contempo- 
rary critics  of  utilitarianism  have  argued,  happiness  isn't  simply  an  algorithm 
of  our  appetites  and  desires.  And  central  to  that  happiness  is  the  unquantifi- 
able  right  to  be  let  alone  by  society — a  right  which  enables  us,  as  human  beings, 
to  remain  true  to  ourselves.  "Privacy  is  not  only  essential  to  life  and  liberty; 
it's  essential  to  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  in  the  broadest  and  deepest  sense. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  17 

We  human  beings  are  not  just  social  creatures;  we're  also  private  creatures." 
Thus  argues  Nicholas  Carr,  one  of  today's  most  articulate  critics  of  digital 
utilitarianism.  "What  we  don't  share  is  as  important  as  what  we  do  share.'"^^ 

Unfortunately,  however,  sharing  has  become  the  new  Silicon  Valley  reli- 
gion and,  as  we  shall  see  in  this  book,  privacy — that  condition  essential  to 
our  real  happiness  as  human  beings — is  being  dumped  into  the  dustbin 
of  history.  "Fail  fast,"  @quixotic,  who  believes  that  privacy  is  "primarily  an 
issue  for  old  people,"^^  advises  entrepreneurs.  "You  jump  off  a  cliff  and  you 
assemble  an  airplane  on  the  way  down,"  is  his  description  for  what  it's  like  to 
do  a  start-up.^ ^  But  the  problem  is  that,  by  so  radically  socializing  today's 
digital  revolution,  we  are,  as  a  species,  collectively  jumping  offa  cliff.  And  if 
we  fail  to  build  a  networked  society  that  protects  the  rights  to  individual 
privacy  and  autonomy  in  the  face  of  today's  cult  of  the  social,  we  can't — like 
the  eternally  optimistic  Hoffman — launch  a  new  company.  Society  isn't  just 
another  start-up — which  is  why  we  can't  entirely  trust  Silicon  Valley  entre- 
preneurs like  Hoffman  or  Stone  with  our  future.  Failing  to  properly  assem- 
ble the  social  media  airplane  after  jumping  off  that  clifFand  crashing  to  the 
ground  means  jeopardizing  those  precious  rights  to  individual  privacy,  se- 
crecy and,  yes,  the  liberty  that  individuals  have  won  over  the  last  millen- 
nium. 

That  is  the  fear,  the  warning  of  failure  and  collective  self-destruction  in 
Digital  Vertigo.  In  2007  I  published  Cult  of  the  Amateur,  my  warning  about 
the  impact  of  Web  2.0's  user-generated  data  revolution  upon  our  culture.  But 
as  we  go  from  the  Web  2.0  of  Google,  YouTube  and  Wikipedia  to  the  Web 
3.0  of  Facebook,  Twitter,  Google  -I-  and  Linkedin,  and  as  the  Internet  be- 
comes a  platform  for  what  @quixotic  describes  as  "real  identities  generating 
massive  amounts  of  data,"^^  the  story  that  you  are  about  to  read  reveals  an 
even  more  disturbing  mania:  today's  creeping  tyranny  of  an  ever-increasingly 
transparent  social  network  that  threatens  the  individual  liberty,  the  happi- 
ness and,  yes,  perhaps  even  the  very  personality  of  contemporary  man. 


18  ANDREW  KEEN 

You  have  two  options  about  this  cult:  DON'T  ALLOW  or  OK. 

The  book  you  are  about  to  read  is  a  defense  of  the  mystery  and  secrecy  of 
individual  existence.  It  is  a  reminder  of  the  right  to  privacy,  autonomy  and 
solitude  in  a  world  that,  by  2020,  will  contain  around  50  billion  intelligent 
networked  devices^^  such  as  my  BlackBerry  Bold  with  its  all-too-intelligent 
apps.  In  a  world  in  which  almost  every  single  human  being  on  the  planet  is 
likely  to  be  connected  by  the  middle  of  the  twenty-first  century,  this  book  is 
an  argument  against  the  radical  sharing,  openness,  personal  transparency, 
great  exhibitionism  and  the  other  pious  communitarian  orthodoxies  of  our 
networked  age.  But  this  book  is  more  than  simply  an  antisocial  manifesto. 
It's  also  an  investigation  into  why,  as  human  beings,  privacy  and  solitude 
makes  us  happy. 

Yes,  you've  seen  this  kind  of  picture  before  too.  It's  a  challenge  to  Reid 
Hoffman's  mistaken  assumption  that  we  are  all,  a  priori,  social  animals.  And 
to  begin  our  journey  into  this  all-too-familiar  future  where  the  unknowable 
mystery  of  the  individual  human  condition  is  being  overwritten  by  transpar- 
ent man,  let's  return  to  Jeremy  Bentham,  that  eternal  prisoner  of  his  own 
Auto-Icon,  whose  late  eighteenth-century  "simple  idea  of  architecture"  to 
reform  the  world  is,  I'm  afraid,  an  eerily  prescient  warning  of  our  collectively 
open  twenty-first-century  fate. 


A  SIMPLE  IDEA  OF  ARCHITECTURE 

"Morals  reformed — health  preserved — industry  invigorated  instruction  diffused — public 

burdens  lightened — Economy  seated,  as  it  were,  upon  a  rock — the  gordian  knot  of  the 

Poor-Laws  are  not  cut,  but  untied — all  by  a  simple  idea  in  Architecture.  "^ 

— JEREMY   BENTHAM 


The  Inspection-House 

If  this  was  a  picture,  you'd  have  seen  it  before.  History,  you  see,  is  repeating 
itself  With  our  new  digital  century  comes  a  familiar  problem  from  the  in- 
dustrial age.  A  social  tyranny  is  once  again  encroaching  upon  individual 
liberty.  Today,  in  the  early  twenty-first  century,  just  as  in  the  nineteenth  and 
twentieth  centuries,  this  social  threat  comes  from  a  simple  idea  in  architec- 
ture. 

In  1787,  at  the  dawn  of  the  mass  industrial  age,  Jeremy  Bentham  designed 
what  he  called  a  "simple  idea  in  architecture"  to  improve  the  management  of 
prisons,  hospitals,  schools  and  factories.  Bentham's  idea  was,  as  the  architec- 
tural historian  Robin  Evans  noted,  a  "vividly  imaginative"  synthesis  of  archi- 
tectural form  with  social  purpose.^  Bentham,  who  amassed  great  personal 
wealth  as  a  result  of  his  social  vision,^  wanted  to  change  the  world  through 
this  new  architecture. 

Bentham  sketched  out  this  vision  of  what  Aldous  Huxley  described  as  a 
"plan  for  a  totalitarian  housing  project""^  in  a  series  of  "open"^  letters  written 
from  the  little  Crimean  town  of  Krichev,  where  he  and  his  brother,  Samuel, 


20  ANDREW  KEEN 

were  instructing  the  regime  of  the  enhghtened  Russian  despot  Catherine 
the  Great  about  the  building  of  efficient  factories  for  its  unruly  population.^ 
In  these  public  letters,  Bentham  imagined  what  he  called  this  "Panopticon" 
or  "Inspection-House"  as  a  physical  network,  a  circular  building  of  small 
rooms,  each  transparent  and  fully  connected,  in  which  individuals  could  be 
watched  over  by  an  all-seeing  inspector.  This  inspector  is  the  utilitarian  ver- 
sion of  an  omniscient  god — always-on,  all-knowing,  with  the  serendipitous 
ability  to  look  around  corners  and  see  through  walls.  As  the  French  histo- 
rian Michel  Foucault  observed,  this  Inspection  House  was  "like  so  many 
cages,  so  many  small  theaters,  in  which  each  actor  is  alone,  perfectly  indi- 
vidualized and  constantly  visible."^ 

The  Panopticon's  connective  technology  would  bring  us  together  by  sep- 
arating us,  Bentham  calculated.  Transforming  us  into  fully  transparent 
exhibits  would  be  good  for  both  society  and  the  individual,  he  adduced,  be- 
cause the  more  we  imagined  we  were  being  watched,  the  more  efficient  and 
disciplined  we  would  each  become.  Both  the  individual  and  the  community 
would,  therefore,  benefit  from  this  network  of  Auto-Icons.  "Ideal  perfec- 
tion," the  utilitarian  figured,  taking  this  supposedly  social  idea  to  its  most 
chillingly  anti-social  conclusion,  would  require  that  everyone — from  con- 
nected prisoners  to  connected  workers  to  connected  school  children  to  con- 
nected citizens — could  be  inspected  "every  instant  of  time."^ 

Rather  than  the  abstract  fantasy  of  an  eccentric  Englishman  whose  expe- 
rience of  life,  you'll  remember,  was  no  more  than  that  of  a  boy,  Bentham's 
radically  transparent  Inspection-House  had  an  enormous  impact  on  new 
prison  architecture  in  the  late  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries. 
The  original  Oxford  jail  where  I  had  breakfasted  with  Reid  Hoffman,  for 
example,  had  been  built  by  the  prolific  prison  architect  William  Blackburn, 
"the  father  of  the  radial  plan  for  prisons,"^  who  built  more  than  a  dozen 
semicircular  jails  on  Benthamite  principles.  In  Oxford,  Blackburn  had  re- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  21 

placed  the  medieval  "gaol"  in  the  city's  castle  with  a  building  designed  to 
supervise  prisoners'  every  movement  and  control  their  time  down  to  the 
very  minute. 

But  Bentham's  simple  idea  of  architecture  "reformed"  more  than  just  pris- 
ons. It  represented  an  augury  of  an  industrial  society  intricately  connected  by 
an  all-too-concrete  network  of  railroads  and  telegraph  lines.  The  mechanical 
age  of  the  stream  train,  the  large-scale  factory,  the  industrial  city,  the  nation- 
state,  the  motion  picture  camera  and  the  mass  market  newspaper  did  indeed 
create  the  physical  architecture  to  transform  us  into  efficient  individual 
exhibits — always,  in  theory,  observable  by  government,  employers,  media 
and  public  opinion.  In  the  industrial  era  of  mass  connectivity,  factories, 
schools,  prisons  and,  most  ominously,  entire  political  systems  were  built 
upon  this  crystalline  technology  of  collective  surveillance.  The  last  two  hun- 
dred years  have  indeed  been  the  age  of  the  great  exhibition. 

Yet  nobody  in  the  industrial  era,  apart  from  the  odd  exhibitionist  like  Ben- 
tham  himself,  actually  wanted  to  become  individual  pictures  in  this  collective 
exhibition.  Indeed,  the  struggle  to  be  let  alone  is  the  story  of  industrial  man. 
As  Georg  Simmel,  the  turn-of-the-twentieth-century  German  sociologist  and 
scholar  of  secrecy,  recognized,  "the  deepest  problems  of  modern  life  derive 
from  the  claim  of  the  individual  to  preserve  the  autonomy  and  individuality 
of  his  existence  in  the  face  of  overwhelming  social  forces,  of  historical  heri- 
tage, of  external  culture,  and  of  the  technique  of  life."^°  Thus  the  great  critics 
of  mass  society — ^John  Stuart  Mill  and  Alexis  de  Tocqueville  in  the  nine- 
teenth and  George  Orwell,  Franz  Kafka  and  Michel  Foucault  in  the  twentieth 
century — have  all  tried  to  shield  individual  liberty  from  the  omniscient  gaze 
of  the  Inspection-House. 

"Visibility,"  Foucault  warned,  "is  a  trap."^^  Thus,  from  J.  S.  Mill's  solitary 
free  thinker  in  On  Liberty  to  Joseph  K  in  The  Castle  and  The  Trial  to  Win- 
ston Smith  in  Nineteen  Eighty-four,  the  hero  of  the  mass  industrial  age  for 


22  ANDREW  KEEN 

these  critics  is  the  individual  who  tries  to  protect  his  invisibility,  who  takes 
pleasure  in  his  own  opacity,  who  turns  his  back  on  the  camera,  who — in  the 
timeless  words  of  Samuel  Warren  and  Louis  Brandeis — just  wants  to  be  let 
alone  by  the  technologies  of  the  mass  industrial  age. 

Our  Age  of  Great  Exhibitionism 

Yet  now,  at  the  dusk  of  the  industrial  and  the  dawn  of  the  digital  epoch,  Ben- 
tham's  simple  idea  of  architecture  has  returned.  But  history  never  repeats  it- 
self, not  identically,  at  least.  Today,  as  the  Web  evolves  from  a  platform  for 
impersonal  data  into  an  Internet  of  people,  Bentham  s  industrial  Inspection- 
House  has  reappeared  with  a  chilling  digital  twist.  What  we  once  saw  as  a 
prison  is  now  considered  as  a  playground;  what  was  considered  pain  is  today 
viewed  as  pleasure. 

The  analog  age  of  the  great  exhibition  is  now  being  replaced  by  the  digi- 
tal age  of  great  exhibitionism. 

Today's  simple  architecture  is  the  Internet — that  ever-expanding  network 
of  networks  combining  the  worldwide  Web  of  personal  computers,  the  wire- 
less world  of  handheld  networked  devices  like  my  BlackBerry  Bold  and  other 
"smart"  social  products  such  as  connected  televisions,^^  gaming  consoles^^ 
and  the  "connected  car"^"* — in  which  around  a  quarter  of  the  globe's  popula- 
tion have  already  taken  up  residency.  In  contrast  with  the  original  brick  and 
mortar  Inspection-House,  this  rapidly  expanding  global  network,  with  its 
two  billion  digitally  interconnected  souls  and  its  more  than  five  billion  con- 
nected devices,  can  house  an  infinite  number  of  rooms.  This  is  a  global  Auto- 
Icon  that,  more  than  two  centuries  after  Jeremy  Bentham  sketched  out  his 
Inspection-House,^^  is  finally  realizing  his  utilitarian  dream  of  allowing  us  to 
be  perpetually  observed. 

This  digital  architecture — described  by  New  York  University  social  me- 
dia scholar  Clay  Shirky  as  the  "connective  tissue  of  society"^^  and  by  U.S. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  23 

Secretary  of  State  Hillary  Clinton  as  the  new  "nervous  system  of  the 
planet"^^ — has  been  designed  to  transform  us  into  exhibitionists,  forever 
on  show  in  our  networked  crystal  palaces.  And,  today,  in  an  age  of  radically 
transparent  online  communities  like  Twitter  and  Facebook,  the  social  has 
become,  in  Shirky's  words,  the  "default"  setting  on  the  Internet, ^^  transform- 
ing digital  technology  from  being  a  tool  of  second  life  into  an  increasingly 
central  part  of  real  life. 

But  this  is  a  version  of  real  life  that  could  have  been  choreographed  by 
Jeremy  Bentham.  As  WikiLeaks  founder  and  self-appointed  transparency 
tsar  Julian  Assange  said,  today's  Internet  is  "the  greatest  spying  machine 
the  world  has  ever  seen,"^^  with  Facebook,  he  added,  being  "the  world's  most 
comprehensive  database  about  people,  their  relationships,  their  names, 
their  addresses,  their  locations,  their  communications  with  each  other, 
and  their  relatives,  all  sitting  within  the  United  States,  all  accessible  to  US 
Intelligence."^^ 

But  it's  not  just  Facebook  that  is  establishing  this  master  database  of  the 
human  race.  As  Clay  Shirky  notes,  popular^ ^  geo-location  services  such  as 
foursquare,  Facebook  places,  Google  Latitude,  Plancast  and  the  Hotlist, 
which  enable  us  to  "effectively  see  through  walls"  and  know  the  exact  location 
of  all  our  friends,  are  making  society  more  "legible,"  thus  allowing  all  of  us  to 
be  read,  in  good  Inspection-House  fashion,  "like  a  book."^^  No  wonder,  then, 
that  Katie  Rolphe,  a  New  York  University  colleague  of  Shirky,  has  observed 
that  "Facebook  is  the  novel  we  are  all  writing."^^ 

Social  media  is  the  confessional  novel  that  we  are  not  only  all  writing  but 
also  collectively  publishing  for  everyone  else  to  read.  We  are  all  becoming 
Wiki-leakers,  less  notorious  but  no  less  subversive  versions  of  Julian  As- 
sange, of  not  only  our  own  lives  but  other  people's  now.  The  old  mass  indus- 
trial celebrity  culture  has  been  so  turned  upside  down  by  social  networks 
like  Facebook,  Linkedin  and  Twitter  that  celebrity  has  been  democratized 


24  ANDREW  KEEN 

and  we  are  reinventing  ourselves  as  self-styled  celebrities,  even  going  as 
far  as  to  deploy  online  services  like  YouCeleb  that  enable  us  to  dress  like 
twentieth-century  mass  media  stars. ^"^ 

There  has,  consequently,  been  a  massive  increase  in  what  Shirky  calls  "self- 
produced"  legibility,  thereby  making  society  as  easy  to  read  as  an  open 
book.^^  As  a  society,  we  are,  to  borrow  some  words  from  Jeremy  Bentham, 
becoming  our  own  collective  image.  This  contemporary  mania  with  our  own 
self-expression  is  what  two  leading  American  psychologists.  Dr.  Jean  Twenge 
and  Dr.  Keith  Campbell,  have  described  as  "the  narcissism  epidemic"^^ — a 
self-promotional  madness  driven,  these  two  psychologists  say,  by  our  need  to 
continually  manufacture  our  own  fame  to  the  world.  The  Silicon  Valley- 
based  psychiatrist.  Dr.  Elias  Aboujaoude,  whose  2011  book.  Virtually  You, 
charts  the  rise  of  what  he  calls  "the  self-absorbed  online  Narcissus,"  shares 
Twenge  and  Campbell's  pessimism.  The  Internet,  Dr.  Aboujaoude  notes, 
gives  narcissists  the  opportunity  to  "fall  in  love  with  themselves  all  over 
again,"  thereby  creating  a  online  world  of  infinite  "self-promotion"  and  "shal- 
low web  relationships."^^ 

Many  other  writers  share  Aboujaoude's  concerns.  The  cultural  historian 
Neal  Gabler  says  that  we  have  all  become  "information  narcissists"  utterly 
disinterested  in  anything  "outside  ourselves."^^  Social  network  culture  med- 
icates our  "need  for  self-esteem,"  adds  best-selling  author  Neil  Strauss,  by 
"pandering  to  win  followers."^^  The  acclaimed  novelist  Jonathan  Franzen 
concurs,  arguing  that  products  like  his  and  my  BlackBerry  Bold  are  "great 
allies  and  enablers  of  narcissism."  These  kind  of  gadgets,  Franzen  explains, 
have  been  designed  to  conform  to  our  fantasy  of  wanting  to  be  "liked"  and 
to  "reflect  well  on  us."  Their  technology,  therefore,  is  simply  an  "extension  of 
our  narcissistic  selves.  When  we  stare  at  screens  in  the  Web  2.0  age,  we  are 
gazing  at  ourselves.  It's  all  one  big  endless  loop.  We  like  the  mirror  and  the 
mirror  likes  us."^^  Franzen  says,  "To  friend  a  person  is  merely  to  include  the 
person  in  our  private  hall  of  flattering  mirrors. "^^ 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  25 

We  broadcast  ourselves  and  therefore  we  are  (not). 

Twenge,  Campbell,  Aboujaoude,  Strauss  and  Franzen  are  all  correct  about 
this  endless  loop  of  great  exhibitionism — an  attention  economy  that,  not  un- 
coincidentally,  combines  a  libertarian  insistence  on  unrestrained  individual 
freedom  with  the  cult  of  the  social.  It's  a  public  exhibition  of  self-love  dis- 
played in  an  online  looking  glass  that  New  Atlantis  senior  editor  Christine 
Rosen  identifies  as  the  "new  narcissism"^^  and  New  York  Times  columnist 
Ross  Douthat  calls  a  "desperate  adolescent  narcissism."^^  Everything — from 
communications,  commerce  and  culture  to  gaming,  government  and 
gambling — is  going  social.  As  David  Brooks,  Douthat's  colleague  at  The 
TimeSy  adds,  "achievement  is  redefined  as  the  ability  to  attract  attention."^'* 
All  we,  as  individuals,  want  to  do  on  the  network,  it  seems,  is  share  our  reputa- 
tions, our  travel  itineraries,  our  war  plans,  our  professional  credentials,  our 
illnesses,  our  confessions,  photographs  of  our  latest  meal,  our  sexual  habits  of 
course,  even  our  exact  whereabouts  with  our  thousands  of  online  friends. 
Network  society  has  become  a  transparent  love-in,  an  orgy  of  oversharing,  an 
endless  digital  Summer  of  Love. 

Like  the  network  itself,  our  mass  public  confessional  is  global.  People  from 
all  around  the  world  are  revealing  their  most  private  thoughts  on  a  transpar- 
ent network  that  anyone  and  everyone  can  access.  In  May  2011,  when  one  of 
China's  richest  men,  a  billionaire  investor  called  Wang  Gongquan,  left  his 
wife  for  his  mistress,  he  wrote  on  the  Chinese  version  of  Twitter,  Sina  Weiba, 
a  service  that  has  140  million  users:  "I  am  giving  up  everything  and  eloping 
with  Wang  Qin.  I  feel  ashamed  and  so  am  leaving  without  saying  good-bye.  I 
kneel  down  and  beg  forgiveness!"^^  Gongquan's  confession  exploded  virally. 
Within  twenty-four  hours,  his  post  was  republished  60,000  times  with  some 
of  the  billionaire's  closest  and  most  powerful  friends  publicly  pleading  with 
him  to  go  back  to  his  wife. 

This  love-in — what  the  author  Steven  Johnson,  an  oversharing  advocate 
who,  as  @stevenberlinjohnson,  has  1.5  million  Twitter  followers  of  his 


26  ANDREW  KEEN 

own,  praised  as  "a  networked  version  of  The  Truman  Show,  where  we  are  all 
playing  Truman,"^*"  is  quite  a  public  spectacle.  Rather  than  The  Truman 
Show,  however,  this  epidemic  of  oversharing,  in  its  preoccupation  with  im- 
mortality, could  be  subtitled  The  Living  and  the  Dead. 

What  If  There  Are  No  Secrets? 

More  and  more  of  us  are  indeed  playing  Truman  in  a  networked  version  of 
our  own  intimately  personalized  show.  "What  if  there  are  no  secrets?"  imag- 
ined JefFjarvis  in  July  2010.^'^  A  transparency  evangelist  at  the  City  Univer- 
sity of  New  York,  Jarvis  popularized  the  neologism  "publicness"  in  a  speech 
that  same  year  entitled  "Privacy,  Publicness  &  Penises."^^  By  very  publicly 
announcing  his  own  prostate  cancer  in  April  2009  and  turning  his  life  into 
"an  open  blog,"^^  Jarvis^^ — the  author  of  the  2011  transparency  manifesto 
Public  Parts,^^  written  in  "homage"  to  shockjock  Howard  Stern's  Private 
Parts  biography'^^ — certainly  promoted  his  own  Benthamite  thesis  that 
"publicness  grants  immortality.""^^  Another  apostle  of  publicness,  the  veteran 
social  theorist  Howard  Rheingold,  who,  back  in  1993  as  a  member  of  the  pio- 
neering Whole  Earth  'Lectronic  Link  (the  WELL),  fathered  the  term  "vir- 
tual community,""^"^  revealed  his  own  struggle  with  colon  cancer  online  in 
early  2010.  A  third  advocate  of  openness,  the  British  technology  writer  Guy 
Kewney,  who  was  afflicted  with  colorectal  cancer,  even  used  social  media  to 
chronicle  his  own  impending  death  in  April  2010. 

While  social  media,  for  all  its  superhuman  ability  to  see  through  walls, 
might  not  quite  guarantee  immortality,  its  impact  is  certainly  of  immense 
historical  significance,  what  Jeff  Jarvis  describes  as  an  "emblem  of  epochal 
change"^^ — as  profound  a  technological  development,  in  its  own  way,  as  any- 
thing invented  in  the  last  fifty  years.  You'll  remember  that  Reid  Hoffman 
defined  this  explosion  of  personal  data  as  "Web  3.0."  But  John  Doerr,^^  the 
wealthiest  venture  capitalist  in  the  world  whom  Amazon  CEO  Jeff  Bezos 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  27 

once  described  as  "the  center  of  gravity  on  the  Internet,"  goes  even  further 
than  @quixotic  in  his  historical  analysis. 

Doerr  argues  that  "social"  represents  "the  great  third  wave"  of  technologi- 
cal innovation,  following  directly  in  the  wake  of  the  invention  of  the  per- 
sonal computer  and  the  Internet.'^'^  The  advent  of  social,  local,  and  mobile 
technology  now  heralds  what  Doerr  calls  a  "perfect  storm"  to  disrupt  tradi- 
tional businesses.^^  Such,  indeed,  is  Doerr  and  his  venture  capitalist  firm  of 
Kleiner  Perkins  confidence  in  this  social  revolution  that,  in  October  2010,  in 
partnership  with  Facebook  and  Mark  Pincus's  Zynga,  Kleiner  launched  a 
quarter-billion-dollar  sFund  dedicated  to  exclusively  putting  money  into  so- 
cial businesses.  While  on  Valentine's  Day  2011,  the  firm  made  what  the  Wall 
Street  Journal  dcscnhtd  as  a  "small"  $38  million  investment  in  Facebook,'^^ 
buying  the  Silicon  Valley  venture  capitalists  no  more  than  an  affectionately 
symbolic  0.073%  stake  in  the  social  media  company.^^  "We're  making  a  blue 
ocean  bet  that  social  is  just  beginning,"  Bing  Gordon,  another  Kleiner  part- 
ner thus  explains  the  firm's  thinking  behind  its  sFund.  "Usage  habits  will 
change  dramatically  over  the  next  4-5  years."^* 

Mark  Zuckerberg,  the  beneficary  of  Kleiner's  generous  Valentine's  Day 
present,  Time  Magazine's  2010  Person  of  the  Year  and  the  semi-fictionalized 
"Accidental  Billionaire"  subject  of  David  Fincher's  hit  2010  movie  The  Social 
Network^^  agrees  with  Gordon  that  we  are  at  the  beginning  of  a  social  revo- 
lution that  will  change  not  only  the  online  user  experience  but  also  our  entire 
economy  and  society.  Zuckerberg  who,  as  the  English  novelist  Zadie  Smith 
notes,  "uses  the  word  connect  as  believers  use  the  word/^^^/^,"^^  is  the  Jeremy 
Bentham  2.0  of  our  digitally  networked  age,  the  social  engineer  who  claims 
to  be  "rewiring  the  world."^"^  And,  like  Bentham  too,  the  Facebook  co-founder 
and  CEO  is  a  "boy  to  the  last"  who  lacks  any  experience  or  knowledge  of  hu- 
man nature  and  who  wants  to  build  a  digital  Inspection-House  in  which 
none  of  us  are  ever  let  alone  again. 


28  ANDREW  KEEN 

Zuckerberg's  excitement  about  the  five-year  horizon  is  certainly  boyish. 
"If  you  look  five  years  out,  every  industry  is  going  to  be  rethought  in  a  social 
way.  You  can  remake  whole  industries.  That's  the  big  thing,"^^  Zuckerberg 
gushed  in  December  2010.  "And  no  matter  where  you  go,"  he  told  Robert 
Scoble,  Silicon  Valley's  uber-evangelist  of  social  media,  "we  want  to  ensure 
that  every  experience  you  have  will  be  social."^^ 

Zuckerberg's  five-year  plan  is  to  eliminate  loneliness.  He  wants  to  create 
a  world  in  which  we  will  never  have  to  be  alone  again  because  we  will  always 
be  connected  to  our  online  friends  in  everything  we  do,  spewing  huge 
amounts  of  our  own  personal  data  as  we  do  it.  "Facebook  wants  to  populate 
the  wilderness,  tame  the  howling  mob  and  turn  the  lonely,  antisocial  world 
of  random  chance  into  a  friendly  world,  a  serendipitous  world,"  Times  Lev 
Grossman  explained  why  his  magazine  made  Zuckerberg  their  Person  of  the 
Year  in  2010.  "You'll  be  working  and  living  inside  a  network  of  people,  and 
you'll  never  have  to  be  alone  again.  The  Internet,  and  the  whole  world,  will 
feel  more  like  a  family,  or  a  college  dorm,  or  an  office  where  your  co-workers 
are  also  your  best  friends."  ^^ 

But  even  today,  in  the  early  stages  of  Zuckerberg's  five-year  plan  to  rewire 
the  world,  Facebook  is  becoming  mankind's  own  image.  Attracting  a  trillion 
page  views  a  month,^^  and  now  hosting  more  active  users  than  the  entire 
population  of  Europe  and  Russia,^^  Facebook  is  where  we  go  to  reveal  every- 
thing about  ourselves.  It's  not  surprising,  therefore,  that  the  satirical  website 
The  Onion,  confirming  Julian  Assange's  remark  about  Facebook  as  history's 
"most  appalling  spying  machine,"  presents  Mark  Zuckerberg's  creation  as  a 
CIA  conspiracy.  "Afiier  years  of  secretly  monitoring  the  public,  we  were  as- 
tounded so  many  people  would  willingly  publicize  where  they  live,  their  reli- 
gious and  political  views,  an  alphabetized  list  of  all  their  friends,  personal 
e-mail  addresses,  phone  numbers,  hundreds  of  photos  of  themselves,  and  even 
status  updates  about  what  they  were  doing  moment  to  moment,"  a  mock 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  29 

CIA  deputy  director  reports  to  Congress  in  the  Onion  skit.  "It  is  truly  a 
dream  come  true  for  the  CI  A."*^^ 

But  perhaps  the  most  disturbing  thing  of  all  is  that  Facebook  isn't  a  CIA 
plant  and  Mark  Zuckerberg  isn't  an  Agency  operative.  Ironically,  Zuckerberg 
five-year  plan  might  make  the  CIA  redundant  or  transform  it  into  a  start-up 
business  division,  what  Silicon  Valley  people  would  call  a  "skunk-works"  proj- 
ect, within  Facebook.  After  all,  professional  spooks  have  little  value  if  we  all 
live  in  a  universal  dorm  room  where  anyone  can  know  what  everyone  else  is 
doing  and  thinking. 

Everyone  can  become  a  secret  policeman  in  a  world  without  personal 
secrets — which  is  why  the  CIA  really  has  set  up  an  Open  Source  Center  at 
its  Virginia  headquarters  where  a  team  of  so-called  "vengeful  librarians" 
stalk  thousands  of  Twitter  and  Facebook  accounts  for  information.^^  That 
may  be  scary  for  the  traditional  powers  that  be  at  the  CIA,  with  their 
industrial-age  assumptions  about  the  top-down,  exclusively  professional 
nature  of  intelligence  work,  but  it's  even  scarier  for  the  rest  of  us  who  cannot 
escape  the  transparent  lighting  of  a  global  electronic  village  in  which  anyone 
can  become  a  vengeful  librarian. 

The  Dial  Tone  for  the  21st  Century 

So  for  who,  exactly,  is  today's  social  media  a  "dream  come  true"? 

Architects  of  digital  transparency,  technologists  of  openness,  venture 
capitalists  and,  of  course,  entrepreneurs  like  Reid  Hoffman,  Biz  Stone  and 
Mark  Pincus  who  are  all  massively  profiting  from  all  these  real  identities 
generating  enormous  amounts  of  their  own  personal  data.  That's  who  are 
transforming  this  "dream"  of  the  ubiquitous  social  network  into  a  reality. 

No,  Mark  Zuckerberg  is  far  from  being  the  only  young  social  media  billion- 
aire gazing,  with  a  mix  of  communitarian  aura  and  financial  greed,  onto  that 
five-year  horizon  when  the  whole  world  will  have  become  a  twenty-first-century 


30  ANDREW  KEEN 

version  of  Bentham's  Inspection-House.  Speaking  at  the  launch  of  the  sFund, 
Zynga  CEO  Mark  Pincus — the  co-owner,  you'll  remember,  with  his  friend 
Rcid  Hoffman,  of  the  future  itself — concurred  with  Zuckerberg's  vision  of  a 
world  radically  reinvented  by  social  technology.  "In  five  years,  everybody 
will  always  be  connected  to  each  other  instead  of  the  web,"  Pincus  pre- 
dicted.^^ Social  companies  like  Zygna,  Facebook,  Linkedin  and  Twitter,  he 
explained,  are  becoming  the  central  plumbing  for  what  he  called  "the  dial 
tones"  for  the  ubiquitous  social  experience  of  tomorrow,  connecting  people 
through  increasingly  invisible  mobile  technology  that  will  always  be  with 
them.  Connectivity,  Pincus  predicts,  will  become  the  electricity  of  the  social 
epoch — so  ubiquitous  that  it  will  be  invisible  and  so  powerful  that  it  threat- 
ens to  become  the  operating  system  for  the  entire  twenty-first  century. 

But  even  today,  it's  increasingly  difficult  to  avoid  the  relentlessly  invasive 
beep  of  Mark  Pincus's  social  dial  tone.  The  digital  networking  of  the  world, 
this  arrival  of  The  Truman  Show  on  all  of  our  screens,  is  both  relentless  and 
inevitable. "^^  By  mid-2011,  the  Pew  Research  Center  found  that  65  percent  of 
American  adults  were  using  social-networking  sites — up  from  just  5  percent 
in  2005.^"^  In  June  2010,  Americans  spent  almost  23  percent  of  their  online 
time  in  social  media  networking — up  a  staggering  43  percent  from  June 
2009,^^  with  use  among  older  adults  (50-64  year  olds)  almost  doubling  in 
this  period  and  the  65+  demographic  being  the  fastest  growing  age  group  on 
Facebook  in  2010  with  a  124  percent  increase  in  sign-ups  over  2009.  And  by 
the  summer  of  2011,  the  Pew  Research  Center  found  that  this  number  has 
risen  dramatically  again,  with  32  percent  of  fifty-  to  sixty-four-year-olds  in 
America  accessing  networks  like  Twitter,  Linkedin  and  Facebook  on  a  daily 
basis.^^ 

Yet,  for  all  Facebook 's  meteoric  growth  among  the  senior  digital  citizens, 
it's  teens  and  high  school  kids  who  have  most  fully  embraced  social  media, 
with  Facebook  and  Twitter  replacing  blogging  as  their  dominant  mode  of 
online  self-expression.^^  As  Mark  Zuckerberg  said,  in  November  2010,  when 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  31 

he  introduced  Facebook's  social  messaging  platform,  "high  school  kids  don't 
use  e-mail."  Unfortunately,  Zuckerberg  is  correct.  In  2010,  e-mail — private 
one-to-one  electronic  communication  that  is  the  digital  version  of  letter 
writing — was,  according  to  ComScore,  down  59  percent  among  teenagers, 
replaced,  of  course,  with  public  social-messaging  platforms  like  Twitter  and 
Facebook.^^ 

Facebook,  with  its  members  investing  over  700  billion  minutes  of  their 
time  per  month  on  the  network,^^  was  the  world's  most  visited  Web  site  in 
2010  making  up  9  percent  of  all  online  traffic.''^  By  early  2011,  57  percent  of 
all  online  Americans  were  logging  onto  Facebook  at  least  once  a  day,  with  51 
percent  of  all  Americans  over  twelve  years  old  having  an  account  on  the  social 
network^^  and  38  percent  of  all  the  Internet's  sharing  referral  traffic  emanat- 
ing from  Zuckerberg's  creation.'^^  By  September  201 1,  more  than  500  million 
people  were  logging  onto  Facebook  each  day^^  with  its  then  almost  800  mil- 
lion active  users  being  larger  than  the  entire  Internet  was  in  2004.'^^  Face- 
book  is  becoming  mankind's  own  image.  It's  where  our  Auto-Icons  now  sit. 

Not  to  be  outdone.  Biz  Stone's  Twitter,  Facebook's  most  muscular  com- 
petitor in  real-time  social  networking,  added  100  million  new  members  in 
2010  who  contributed  to  the  25  billion  tweets  sent  that  year^^  and,  by  Octo- 
ber 2011,  were  authoring  a  quarter-billion  tweets  per  day  (that's  more  than 
10,000  messages  authored  per  second)  with  more  than  50  million  users 
logging  onto  the  site  every  day.'^^  Then  there's  the  social  ecommerce  start-up 
Groupon,  whose  35 -million  subscriber  base  and  annual  revenue  of  around 
$2  billion  makes  it  the  fastest  growing  company  in  American  history.  In 
December  2010,  Groupon  turned  down  a  $6  billion  acquisition  offisr  from 
Google  and  instead  raised  almost  a  billion  dollars  of  its  own  from  private 
investors  before  launching  its  own  oversubscribed  November  2011  IPO  in 
which  the  company  was  valued  at  $16.5  billion.'^'^  Groupon's  most  direct 
competitor,  LivingSocial,  with  its  rumored  $6  billion  valuation  and  ex- 
pected $1  billion  revenue  in  2011,  is  also  experiencing  meteoric  growth.^^ 


32  ANDREW  KEEN 

Meanwhile,  Pincus's  social  gaming  start-up  Zynga  continues  its  own  quest 
for  global  domination:  Founded  in  July  2007,  the  Silicon  Valley-based 
company,  which  includes  Facebook's  most  popular  apps  CitiVille  and  Farm- 
ville'^^  in  its  network,  is  now  delivering  an  astonishing  1  petabyte  of  daily 
data,  adding  1,000  new  servers  a  week  and  has  had  its  social  games  played 
together  by  215  million  people,  which  corresponds  to  about  10  percent  of 
the  world's  entire  online  population.^^  No  wonder,  then,  that  Pincus's  still 
private  three-and-a-half-year-old  company  raised  a  $500  million  round  of 
investment  from  a  number  of  venture  capitalists — including,  of  course, 
Kleiner — at  a  $10  billion  valuation,^^  before  launching  its  own  IPO  in  De- 
cember 2011. 

The  rate  of  growth  for  younger  social  media  companies  is  equally  jaw  drop- 
ping. Foursquare,  one  of  Silicon  Valley's  hottest  social  start-ups,  grew  by  3400 
percent  in  2010  and,  by  August  2011,  the  then  year-old  geo-location  service 
was  getting  3  million  check-ins  per  day  from  its  10  million  members, ^^  with 
its  users  growing  to  15  million  by  December  2011.^^  A  second,  the  blogging 
platform  Tumblr,  was  growing  by  a  quarter  billion  impression  every  week  in 
early  2011,^"^  and,  by  September  2011,  had  raised  $85  million  in  fresh  financ- 
ing and  was  attracting  13  billion  average  monthly  page  views  from  its  30  mil- 
lion blogs.^^  Another,  the  social  knowledge  network  Quora,  founded  by 
former  Facebook  technologists  Adam  D'Angelo  and  Charlie  Cheever,^^  was 
valued  at  $86  million  by  investors  before  the  advertising  free  service  had  even 
established  a  business  model  for  making  money^^  and  was  rumored  to  have 
"scoffed"  at  a  $1  billion  acquisition  offer.^^  Not  to  be  outdone,  the  social  pho- 
tography app  Instagram  reached  2  million  users  in  only  four  months  since  its 
late  2010  launch — making  its  phenomenal  rate  of  growth  three  times  faster 
than  that  of  foursquare  and  six  times  more  viral  than  Twitter. 

Once  just  a  medium  for  the  distribution  of  impersonal  data,  the  Internet 
is  now  a  network  of  companies  and  technologies  designed  around  social 
products,  platforms  and  services — transforming  it  from  an  impersonal  data- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  33 

base  into  a  global  digital  brain  publicly  broadcasting  our  relationships,  our 
intentionality  and  our  personal  taste.  The  integration  of  our  personal  data — 
renamed  by  social  media  marketers  as  our  "social  graph" — into  online  con- 
tent is  now  the  central  driver  of  Internet  innovation  in  Reid  Hoffman's  Web 
3.0  age.  By  enabling  our  thousands  of  "friends"  to  know  exactly  what  we  are 
doing,  thinking,  reading,  watching  and  buying,  today's  Web  products  and 
services  are  powering  our  hypervisible  age  of  great  exhibitionism.  No  won- 
der, then,  that  the  World  Economic  Forum  describes  personal  data  as  a  "New 
Asset  Class"^^  in  the  global  economy. 

In  early  20 11,  Sergey  Brin,  Google  co-founder,  acknowledged  that  Google 
had  only  "touched"  1  percent  of  social  search's  potential.^^  But  even  today, 
with  social  realizing  only  a  few  percentage  points  of  what  it  will  eventually 
become,  this  revolution  is  dramatically  reshaping  not  just  the  Internet  but 
also  our  identities  and  personalities.  Whether  we  like  it  or  not,  twenty-first- 
century  life  is  increasingly  being  lived  in  public.  Four  out  of  five  college  ad- 
missions offices,  for  example,  are  looking  up  applicants'  Facebook  profiles 
before  making  a  decision  on  whether  to  accept  them.^^  A  February  2011  hu- 
man resources  survey  suggested  that  almost  half  of  HR  managers  believed  it 
was  likely  that  our  social  network  profiles  are  replacing  our  resumes  as  the 
core  way  for  potential  employers  to  evaluate  us.^^  The  New  York  Times  reports 
that  some  firms  have  even  begun  using  surveillance  services  like  Social  Intel- 
ligence, which  can  legally  store  data  for  up  to  seven  years,  to  collect  social 
media  information  about  prospective  employees  before  giving  them  jobs.^^ 
"In  today's  executive  search  market,  if  you're  not  on  Linkedin,  you  don't 
exist,"  one  job  search  expert  told  The  Wall  Street  Journal  in  June  2011.^"^ 
Linkedin  now  even  enables  its  users  to  submit  their  profiles  as  resumes,  thus 
inspiring  one  "personal  branding  guru"  to  announce  that  the  100  million 
member  professional  network  is  "about  to  put  Job  Boards  (and  Resumes)  out 
of  business. "^^ 

Mark  Zuckerberg  once  said  "movies  are  naturally  social  things."^^  What 


34  ANDREW  KEEN 

he  forgot  to  add  is  that  in  this  brave  new  world  of  shared  information,  re- 
sumes, pictures,  books,  travel,  music,  business,  politics,  education,  shopping, 
location,  finance  and  knowledge  are,  it  seems,  also  naturally  social  things. 

So  my  question  for  Zuckerberg — who  already  has  51  percent  of  all  Ameri- 
cans over  twelve  years  old  on  his  network  and  who  believes  that  kids  under 
thirteen  should  be  allowed  to  have  Facebook  accounts^'^ — is  very  simple: 
Mark,  in  your  vision  of  the  future,  please  tell  me  something  that  isn't  a  social 
thing? 

Nothing.  That,  of  course,  would  be  his  answer.  Everything  is  going  social, 
he  would  say.  Social  is,  to  borrow  a  much  overused  metaphor,  the  tsunami 
that  is  altering  our  entire  social,  educational,  personal  and  business  land- 
scape. And,  I'm  afraid,  Mark  Zuckerberg  isn't  alone  in  seeing  social  as  that 
tidal  wave  that,  for  better  or  worse,  is  flattening  everything  in  its  path. 

The  Emerald  Sea 

On  the  wall  of  an  otherwise  nondescript  fourth-floor  Silicon  Valley  office  is 
a  picture  of  a  great  wave  crashing  against  the  beach.  In  its  foamy,  tumescent 
wake  lies  the  corpse  of  a  small  fishing  boat.  This  picture  is  a  copy  of  "Emer- 
ald Sea,"  an  1878  landscape  of  the  Californian  coastline  by  the  romantic 
American  artist  Albert  Bierstadt,  and  it  hangs  in  the  Mountain  View  office 
of  Google,  the  dominant  Web  2.0  company  that  is  now  aggressively  trying 
to  transform  itself  into  a  Web  3.0  social  media  player. 

No,  it's  not  just  me  that  is  using  the  metaphor  of  a  great  wave  to  describe 
the  social  revolution.  In  the  second  half  of  2010,  acknowledging  the  failure  of 
Buzz  and  Wave,  its  first  generation  social  media  products,  and  realizing  that 
social  media  threatens  to  turn  this  Web  2.0  leader  into  a  Web  3.0  laggard, 
Google  established  an  elite  army  of  engineers  and  business  executives  led  by 
its  S  VP  of  Social  Business,  Vic  Gundotra  and  Bradley  Horowitz,  its  VP  of 
product  and  incorporating  eighteen  Google  products  and  thirty  traditional 
product  teams.  What  Gundotra  described  to  me  as  a  "project"  was  called 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  35 

Emerald  Sea  and  it  referred  directly  to  Bierstadt's  idealized  nineteenth- 
century  landscape,  with  its  enormous  wave  crashing  down  against  the  coast- 
line. "We  needed  a  code  name  that  captured  the  fact  that  either  there  was  a 
great  opportunity  to  sail  to  new  horizons  and  new  things,  or  that  we  were 
going  to  drown  by  this  wave,"  Gundotra  explained  the  project  that,  a  year 
later,  conceived  the  Google  -I-  social  network.  ^^ 

Bradley  Horowitz  described  Emerald  Sea's  100-day  ambition  of  trans- 
forming Google  into  a  social  company  as  a  "wild-ass  crazy,  get-to-the-moon" 
goal.  But  it  was,  in  fact,  a  wise  move  by  the  once  dominant  search  company 
that  has  been  forced  to  play  social  catch-up  to  Facebook,  Zynga,  Groupon, 
LivingSocial,  Twitter,  and  the  rest  of  the  Web  3.0  tidal  wave.  You  see,  on  to- 
day's Internet,  it  seems,  everything — and  I  mean  absolutely  everything — is 
going  social.  The  Internet's  core  logic,  its  dominant  algorithm,  has  been 
reinvented  to  operate  on  social  principles — which  is  why  some  technology 
pundits  are  already  predicting  that  Facebook  will  soon  surpass  Google  in 
advertising  revenues.^^ 

The  result  is  a  flood  of  new  online  social  businesses,  technologies  and 
networks  with  collaborative  names  like  GroupMe,  Socialcast,  LivingSocial, 
SocialVibe,  PeekYou,  BeKnown,  Togetherville,  Socialcam,  SocialFlow, 
SproutSocial,  SocialEyes  and,  most  appropriately  for  our  hypervisible  age,  Hy- 
perpublic.  And  it's  not  just  Kleiner-Perkins  that  is  pouring  billions  of  dollars 
of  investment  into  this  social  economy.  The  smartest  investors  in  the  Valley 
are  all  going  social.  In  the  first  half  of  2011,  for  example,  the  Silicon  Valley- 
based  VC  firm  of  Andreessen  Horowitz,  managed  by  Netscape  founder  Mark 
Andreessen,  the  technologist  who  sparked  the  original  Web  1.0  boom  in  Au- 
gust 1995  with  his  company's  historic  IPO,  invested  hundreds  of  millions  of 
dollars  in  Facebook,  Twitter,  Groupon,  Zynga  and  Skype.^^^  Then  there's 
Mike  Moritz,  the  legendary  Silicon  Valley  venture  capitalist  who  invested  in 
Google,  Yahoo!,  Apple  and  YouTube,  who  is  now  a  board  member  at  @quix- 
otic's  Linkedln.^^'  While  Chris  Sacca,  who  The  JVali  Street  Journal  described 


36  ANDREW  KEEN 


as  "possibly  the  most  influential  businessman  in  America,  is  now  managing  a 
J.P.  Morgan  funded  billion  dollar  investment  fund  which,  in  early  2011,  in- 
vested several  hundred  million  dollars  in  Twitter.^^^ 

Doerr,  Andreessen,  Moritz,  Sacca  and,  of  course,  my  old  sparring  partner 
@quixotic  all  recognize  the  profound  changes  that  are  transforming  the 
Web  2.0  into  the  Web  3.0  economy.  The  old  link  Internet  market,  domi- 
nated by  Google's  artificial  search  algorithm,  is  being  replaced  with  the 
"like"  economy,  symbolized  by  the  first  working  product  that  came  out  of 
the  Emerald  Sea  project,  Google's  "-I-1"  social  search.  Described  by  Tech- 
crunch's  MG  Siegler  as  a  "massive"^^^  technological  initiative,  the  prolifi- 
cally  viral -hi — which  was  launched  in  June  201 1'^'^  and  within  three 
months  could  be  found  on  a  million  Web  sites  generating  more  than  4  bil- 
lion daily  views^°^ — adds  a  social  layer  of  public  recommendations  from 
friends  not  only  on  top  of  the  dominant  search  engine's  nonhuman  artifi- 
cial algorithm  but  also  above  its  advertising  platform.  "Whether  they  ad- 
mit it  or  not,"  Siegler  says  of-i-1,  "Google  is  at  war  with  Facebook  for 
control  of  the  web." 

That's  because  H-l  allows  us  to  publicly  recommend  search  results  and 
Web  sites,  thus  replacing  Google's  artificial  algorithm  as  the  engine  of  the 
new  social  economy.  In  the  -Hi  world,  we  all  will  eventually  become  person- 
alized versions  of  the  old  Google  search  engine — directing  Web  traffic 
around  our  transparent  tastes,  opinions  and  preferences.  Siegler  is  correct. 
The  stakes  in  this  new  war  between  Google  and  Facebook  really  are  about 
control  of  the  Internet.  No  wonder,  then,  that  Larry  Page,  the  new  Google 
CEO,  tied  25  percent  of  all  Google  employee  bonuses  in  2011  to  the  success 
of  the  company's  social  strategy.  ^^^ 

Gundotra  and  Horowitz  acknowledged  the  centrality  of  the  company's 
social  strategy  when  they  appeared  on  my  TechcrunchTV  show  in  July 
2011^^'^  to  discuss  the  informal  launch  of  their  second  product,  a  social  net- 
work called  Google -I- that,  while  still  in  beta,  amassed  20  million  unique 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  37 

visitors  in  just  three  weeks^^^  and,  in  the  seven  days  after  its  June  201 1  release, 
increased  the  company's  market  cap  by  $20  billion. ^^^  Marginalizing  the  im- 
portance of  the  company's  artificial  algorithm,  Horowitz  boasted  that 
Google  +  puts  "people  first,"  while  Gundotra  presented  Google  +  as  "the 
glue"  that  unites  all  of  Google's  products — from  its  algorithmic  search  to 
YouTube  to  Gmail  to  its  myriad  of  advertising  products  and  services. 

So  is  Google  now  a  "social  company"?  I  asked  Gundotra. 

"Yes,"  Google's  VP  of  Social  replied  about  the  Google  +  community, 
which,  in  the  100  days  after  its  beta  launch  in  June  201 1,  had  grown  to  40  mil- 
lion members.^^^  and  which  is  predicted  to  include  200  million  members  by 
the  end  of  2012.111 

As  a  social  company,  it's  hardly  surprising,  therefore,  that  Google  fol- 
lowed up  the  launch  its  Google  -I-  network  with  the  January  2012  introduc- 
tion of  "Search,  plus  Your  World"  (SPYW)— a  Web  3.0  product  that  Steven 
Levy,  the  author  o^InJhe  Plex  and  the  world's  leading  authority  on  Google, 
describes  as  a  "startling  transformation"  of  the  company's  search  engine. ^^ 
With  SPYW,  the  content  on  the  Google  -I-  social  network  replaces  the  com- 
pany's artificial  algorithm  as  the  brain  of  its  search  engine;  with  SPYW,  the 
old  Google  search  engine,  once  the  very  heart  and  soul  of  the  Web  2.0 
world,  becomes  merely  what  Levy  calls  an  "amplifier  of  social  content." 

In  George  Orwell's  Nineteen  Eighty-four,  1  +  1  was  said  to  equal  5.  But  in 
today's  social  information  age,  when  we  are  all  publicly  broadcasting  our 
personal  tastes,  habits  and  locations  on  networks  like  Google -h,  what 
might -Hi  plus -1-1  equal? 

-f1  -h-hi  ++'^++^  -h-Hi  ++\  ++^+^ 

It  will  not  quite  compute  into  a  googol— 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, 
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  to  be  exact— but  the  -hi 
social  economy  has  already  spawned  into  thousands  of  new  Web  sites,  billions 


38  ANDREW  KEEN 

of  dollars  of  investment  and  revenue,  and  countless  new  apps  incorporating 
all  the  personal  data  of  the  hundreds  of  millions  of  people  on  the  social 
web. 

This  personal  data,  what  Google's  Bradley  Horowitz  euphemistically  calls 
putting  "people  first,"  is  the  core  ingredient,  the  revolutionary  fuel,  power- 
ing the  Web  3.0  economy.  But  the  Internet  is  radically  changing  too,  its  ar- 
chitecture reflecting  the  new  social  dial  tone  for  the  twenty-first  century. 
Everything  on  the  Web — from  its  infrastructure  to  its  navigation  to  its  enter- 
tainment to  its  commerce  to  its  communications — is  going  social.  John 
Doerr  is  right.  Today's  Web  3.0  revolution,  this  Internet  of  people,  is  indeed 
the  third  great  wave  of  technological  innovation,  as  profound  as  the  inven- 
tion of  both  the  personal  computer  and  the  Worldwide  Web  itself. 

The  Internet's  business  infrastructure,  its  core  architecture,  is  getting  a 
major  social  overhaul — so  that  every  technology  platform  and  service  is 
shifting  from  a  Web  2.0  to  the  Web  3.0  model.  Internet  browsers,  search  en- 
gines and  email  services — the  trinity  of  technologies  that  shape  our  daily  In- 
ternet use — are  becoming  social.  Everyone  in  Silicon  Valley,  it  seems,  is  going 
into  the  business  of  eliminating  loneliness.  To  compete  with  Google's  SPYW, 
there  are  now  Facebook-powered  "liked  results"  from  Microsoft's  Bing  search 
engine, ^^^  as  well  as  the  Greplin  and  Blekko  search  engines  and  a  "people" 
search  engine  from  PeekYou  that  has  already  indexed  the  records  of  over  250 
million  people.  There  are  social  Internet  browsers  from  Rockmelt  and 
Firefox,  and  social  updating  from  Meebo's  increasingly  ubiquitous  MiniBar 
messenger.  There  is  social  email  from  Gmail's  People  Widget,  Microsoft 
Outlook's  Social  Connector  and  from  start-ups  like  Xobni  and  Rapportive 
for  old  fogies  like  myself  who  are  still  relying  on  archaic  email.  ^^"^ 

It's  not  just  email.  All  online  communications — from  video  to  audio  to 
text  messaging  to  microblogging — is  going  social.  There  are  real-time  social 
video  platforms  from  Socialcam,  Showyou,  SocialEyes,  Tout  and  from  Air- 
time,  a  start-up  founded  by  the  real  Sean  Parker  and  Shawn  Fanning,  the  co- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  39 

founder  of  Napster,  which  is  quite  Hteraily  focused,  according  to  Parker,  on 
"eUminating  loneliness."^  ^^  There  are  social  texting  and  messaging  apps  from 
the  Skype  acquisition  GroupMe,^^^  as  well  as  from  Facebook's  Beluga,  Yo- 
bongo,  Kik  and  many  other  equally  unpronouncable  start-ups.  There  is  social 
blogging  on  Tumblr,  social  "curation"  from  Pinterest,  social  "conversation" 
from  Glow,^^''  small  group  social  networking  on  Path  that  has  amassed  almost 
a  million  users  in  under  a  year^^^  and  workplace  social  communications  from 
Yammer  and  Chatter  that  each  have  around  100,000  companies  using  their 
platforms.^ ^^  Then  there  is  Rypple,  a  social  tool  for  "internal  employee  man- 
agement," which  enables  everybody  in  a  company  to  rate  everyone  else,  thereby 
transforming  work  into  a  kind  of  never-ending  real-time  show  trial.  ^^° 

Entertainment  is  going  social,  too.  In  December  2011,  YouTube's  home- 
page went  social,  emphasizing  the  Google  -I-  and  Facebook  networks  in  what 
the  video  leviathan  called  "the  biggest  redesign  in  its  history."^^^  There  is  so- 
cial music  and  social  sound  from  Pandora,  the  iTunes  Ping  network,  Sound- 
cloud  and  Soundtracking.^^^  There  are  social  reality  television  shows  on 
American  Idol  and  The  X-Factor}^^  social  information  about  what  movies 
we  are  watching  on  GetGlue,  social  TV  networks  like  Into.Now  and  Philo, 
which  reveal  to  the  world  our  viewing  habits,  and  Facebook  integration  on 
Hulu  which  enables  us  to  share  our  remarks  with  all  our  friends.  Social  TV 
means  everyone  will  know  what  everyone  else  is  viewing.  "Miso  now  knows 
what  you're  watching,  no  check-in  required,"  thus  warns  a  headline  in  The 
New  York  Times  about  Miso,  a  social  TV  app  that  can  already  automatically 
recognize  the  viewing  habits  of  DirecTV  satellite  subscribers.^^"* 

Most  ominously  of  all,  the  online  movie  jugernaut  Netflix — already  esti- 
mated to  be  the  origin  of  30  percent  of  all  Internet  traffic^^^ — is  so  commit- 
ted to  deeply  integrating  its  service  with  Facebook  that  its  CEO,  Reed 
Hastings,  gazing  like  Mark  Zuckerberg  onto  the  five-year  horizon,  acknowl- 
edged in  June  201 1  that  he  has  a  "five-year  investment  path"  for  making  social 
central  to  his  company's  product  development. ^^^ 


40  ANDREW  KEEN 

The  news  industry,  another  core  pillar  of  twentieth-century  media,  is  try- 
ing to  transform  itself  with  social  technology.  There  are,  for  example,  socially 
produced  news  stories  from  the  New  York  Times' News. mc^^^  and  from  Flip- 
board,  the  2010  start-up  behind  the  social  magazine  app  for  mobile  devices 
that  is  already  valued  at  $200  million  and  includes  Kleiner-Perkins  and  Ash- 
ton  Kutcher  as  investors  and  Oprah  Winfrey's  OWN  cable  network  as  a 
content  distribution  partner. ^^^ 

Of  all  twentieth-century  media,  it  is  the  once  mostly  private  art  of  pho- 
tography that  is  being  most  radically  socialized  by  the  Web  3.0  revolution. 
Hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars  are  being  poured  into  social  photography  so 
that  we  can  share  all  our  intimate  pictures  with  the  world.  There  are  social 
photos  from  the  social  self-portrait  network  Dailybooth,  from  the  sensation- 
ally popular  Instagram  app,  from  the  $15  million  photo  and  gaming  start-up 
ImageSocial,^^^  and  from  Color,  a  "proximity  based"  photo  sharing  service 
"with  no  privacy  settings"  that  raised  $41  million  in  March  2011  before  its 
product  had  even  been  launched.^^^ 

But  it's  our  contemporary  mania  for  revealing  our  location  which  is  the 
most  chilling  aspect  of  the  Web's  new  collective  architecture.  There  are  social 
geo-location  services  not  only  from  foursquare,  Loopt,  Buzzd,  Facebook 
Places  and  the  Reid  Hoffman  investment  Gowalla  (which  was  acquired  by 
Facebook  in  December  2011),  but  also  from  the  MeMap  app  that  enables  us 
to  track  all  the  check-ins  of  our  Internet  friends  on  a  single  networked  map^^^ 
and  from  Sonar,  which  identifies  other  friends  in  our  vicinity. ^^^  There  is  so- 
cial mapping  on  Google  Maps,  social  travel  recommendations  on  Wanderfly, 
social  seating  on  aircrafts  from  KLM  and  Malaysia  Airlines's  MHBuddy,^^^ 
social  travel  information  on  Tripit,  social  driving  on  the  Kleiner-funded 
Waze  app^^"^  and  on  the  social  license  plate  network  Bump.com^^^  and,  most 
bizarrely  of  all,  social  bicycling  from  the  iPhone  app  Cyclometer,  which  en- 
ables our  friends  to  track,  hear  and  share  exactly  where  we  are  and  what  we 
are  doing  on  our  bicycles. 


I 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  41 

Even  time  itself,  both  the  past  and  the  future,  is  becoming  social.  Proust, 
a  social  network  designed  to  store  our  memories,  is  trying — presumably  in  an 
attempt  to  emulate  the  eponymous  French  novelist — to  socialize  the  past.^^^ 
There  are  "social  discovery"  engines  like  The  Hotlist  and  Plancast  that  have 
aggregated  information  from  over  100  million  Web  users  that  enables  us  to 
not  only  see  where  our  friends  have  been  and  currently  are  located  but  also  to 
predict  where  they  will  be  in  the  future.  There  is  even  a  social  "intentional- 
ity"  app  from  Ditto  that  enables  you  to  share  what  you  will  and  should  do 
with  everyone  on  your  network,^^''  while  the  WhereBerry  social  networking 
service  enables  us  to  tell  our  friends  what  movies  we  want  to  see  and  restau- 
rants that  we'd  like  to  try. 

But  the  social  media  revolution  isn't  just  about  obscurely  named  start-ups — 
many  of  which,  in  today's  Darwinian  struggle  for  digital  domination,  will 
inevitably  fail.  Take,  for  example,  Microsoft,  the  former  technology  leader 
that  is  now  trying  to  buy  its  way  into  the  social  economy.  Microsoft's  in- 
tended $8.5  billion  acquisition  of  Skype,  announced  in  May  2011 — the  com- 
pany's largest  acquisition  in  its  history — is  an  attempt  to  socialize  its  Internet 
business.  This  acquisition  seeks  to  leverage  Skype's  active  145  million  users 
into  a  Microsoft  centric  social  network  that  will  maintain  the  company's  rel- 
evance in  the  social  media  age.^^^ 

Like  Microsoft,  every  presocial  technology  company  is  now  trying  to  surf 
the  Emerald  wave.  Indeed,  there  are  now  so  many  social  business  products 
from  large  enterprises  like  IBM  (Connections  Social  Software),  Monster, 
com  (the  Facebook  app  Beknown),  and  Salesforce  (Yammer)  that  one  analyst 
told  the  Wall  Street  Journal  "it's  hard  to  think  of  a  company  that  isn't  selling 
enterprise  social  software  now."^^^  And  the  corporate  world  is  embracing 
Web  3.0  technology,  too,  with  "enlightened  companies"  such  as  Gatorade, 
Farmer's  Insurance,  Domino's  Pizza,  and  Ford  investing  massively  in  social 
media  marketing  campaigns.  "If  you  want  to  reach  a  millennium,"  wrote  one 
of  Ford's  social  media  evangelists  in  a  justification  of  why  they  sent  a  tweeting 


42  ANDREW  KEEN 

car  across  America,  "you  have  to  go  where  they  Uve,  and  that  means  on- 
line."i^« 

Yes,  the  fictional  Sean  Parker  from  The  Social  Network  got  it  right:  First 
we  hved  in  villages,  then  in  cities  and  now  we  are  increasingly  living  online. 
And  the  truth  is  that  today  it's  hard  to  actually  think  of  an  Internet  start-up 
whose  products  or  services  aren't  embracing  the  web's  new  social  architec- 
ture. This  revolution  in  sharing  our  personal  data  extends  to  every  imagin- 
able nook  and  crevice  of  both  the  online  and  offline  world.  Even  a  partial  list 
makes  one's  head  spin.  So  the  next  few  paragraph  are  best  read  sitting  down. 

Given  that  social  media  advertising's  annual  revenue  is  expected  to  grow 
from  its  2011  total  of  $5.5  billion  to  $10  billion  by  2013, ^''^  the  online  adver- 
tising business  is  now  going  social,  with  the  meteoric  growth  of  platforms 
like  RadiumOne  that  serve  up  ads  based  on  what  our  friends  like^^^  and  So- 
cialVibe,  the  branding  marketing  engine  that  is  fuelling  the  Zynga  net- 
work.^^^  TKere  are  now  hundreds  of  collaborative  commerce  start-ups  with 
communitarian  names  like  BuyWithMe  and  ShopSocially  attempting  to 
emulate  Groupon  and  LivingSocial.  For  the  socially  conscious,  there  are  so- 
cial networks  for  social  entrepreneurs  at  Like  Minded  and  Craig  Connect, 
social  investment  from  CapLinked,^'^^  socially  generated  charity  from  Jumo 
and  social  fund-raising  from  Fundly.  There  are  social  networks  for  foodies 
like  My  Fav  Food,  Cheapism^'^^  and  Grubwithus^'^^  and,  as  an  antidote,  social 
dieting  apps^'^^  like  Daily  Burn,  Gain  Fitness,  Loselt,  Social  Workout  and 
Fibit — a  social  gadget  that  broadcasts  to  the  world  its  users'  sex  lives. ^'^^ 

There  are  social  networks  like  Yatown,^'*^  Hey,  Neighbor!,  Nextdoor.com, 
and  Zenergo^^^  that  have  been  designed  to  connect  local  neighbors  and  real 
world  activities.  There  is  the  bizarre  Google  -H  and  Twitter  clone  Chime. in, 
which  allows  you  to  follow  "part  of  a  person.  ^^^  There  is  social  discovery  from 
ShoutFlow,  which  describes  itself  as  a  "magical"  app  for  finding  "relevant" 
people  nearby.^^^  TKere  is  social  education  from  OpenStudy  that  "wants  to 
turn  the  world  into  one  big  study  group."^^^  There  are  social  productivity  tools 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  43 

from  Manymoon  and  Asana,^^"*  professional  social  networking  from  Be- 
Known,  social  event  networking  from  MingleBird,  social  media  analytics 
from  Social  Bakers,  social  investing  from  AngelList,  and  social  consumer 
information  on  SocialSmack  and  something  called  a  "marketplace  for  social 
transactions"  from  Jig.^^^  There  is  social  local  data  from  Hyperpublic,  social 
cardio  training  from  Endomondo*^^  and  a  growing  infestation  of  social  net- 
works for  children  like  Club  Penguin,  giantHello  and  the  creepily  named 
Togetherville — a  kids'  network  that  Disney  acquired  in  February  2011.^^'^ 
Perhaps  most  eerily  of  all,  there  is  even  a  so-called  social  "serendipity  engine" 
from  Shaker — a  well  backed  and  much  hyped  Israeli  start-up  that  won  Tech- 
crunch's  2011  Disrupt  championship — which  turns  Facebook  into  a  virtual 
bar  for  meeting  strangers. *^^ 

Phew!  And  if  this  vertiginous  wave  of  social  networks  isn't  enough,  then 
there  is  social  reading — offering  a  giant  collective  hello  to  book  lovers  every- 
where. Yes,  reading,  that  most  intensely  private  and  illicit  of  all  modern  indi- 
vidual experiences,  is  being  transformed  into  a  disturbingly  social  spectacle. 
Some  of  you  may  even  be  reading  this  book  socially — meaning  that  instead 
of  sitting  alone  with  this  book,  you'll  be  sharing  your  hitherto  intimate  read- 
ing experience  in  real-time  with  thousands  of  your  closest  Facebook  or  Twit- 
ter friends  via  your  e-readers  through  social  services  like  Amazon's  Kindle 
profiles. ^^^  Indeed,  in  January  2011  Scribd,  a  social  reading  company  with  a 
mission  to  "liberate  the  written  word,  to  connect  people  with  the  informa- 
tion and  ideas  that  matter  most  to  them,"^^^  raised  $13  million  in  order  to 
add  more  "social  features"  to  every  mobile  networked  device. ^^^  Meanwhile, 
Rethink  Books,  a  collaborative  reading  company,  launched  the  Bible  as  a 
socialized  product,  perhaps  with  the  intention  of  creating  a  "direct  social 
channel"  between  the  book's  "Author"  and  its  readers. ^^^ 

Maybe  Rethink  Books  should  acquire  the  social  cardio  training  network 
Endomondo  and  rename  itself  You  see,  social  reading  really  does,  in  a  sense, 
represent  (he  end  of  the  world.  It  means  the  end  of  the  isolated  reader,  the  end 


44  ANDREW  KEEN 

of  solitary  thought,  the  end  of  purely  individual  literary  reflection,  the  end 
of  those  long  afternoons  spent  entirely  alone  with  just  a  book. 

Nervous  about  the  coming  social  dictatorship?  Need  a  cigarette  break 
with  fellow  smokers?  Don't  worry,  there  is  even  a  social  networking  device 
for  smokers,  introduced  by  a  company  called  Blu  in  June  2011,  which  sells 
electronically  enhanced  e-cigarettes  ($80  for  a  five  pack)  that  enable  their 
owners  to  download  their  contact  information  onto  personal  computers 
and  connect  with  other  smokers. ^^^ 

Endomondo,  indeed. 

SocialEyes  Is  Creepy 

MingleBird,  PeekYou,  Hotlist,  Rypple,  Scribd,  Sonar,  Quora,  Togetherville 
and  the  thousands  of  Web  3.0  companies  are  creating,  social  brick  by  social 
brick,  a  global  networked  electronic  Inspection-House,  a  twenty-first- 
century  home  in  which  we  can  all  watch  each  other  all  of  the  time.  Take,  for 
example,  SocialEyes  (pronounced  i^a^/Zz^),  the  social  video  start-up  founded 
by  Rob  Glaser,  the  former  Microsoft:  executive  and  CEO  of  RealNetworks, 
and  backed  by  a  number  of  blue  chip  West  Coast  venture  capital  firms. 
Launched  in  beta  form  in  March  2011,  SocialEyes  unintentionally  captures 
the  matrix  for  our  age  of  great  exhibitionism,  making  it  a  metaphorical  pic- 
ture of  our  collective  future. 

"It  looks  like  there  is  a  wall  of  video  cubes,  like  the  set  of  Hollywood 
Squares^  Glaser  explained  the  SocialEyes  interface."  You  can  see  yourself  in 
one  of  these  squares  and  then  start  initiating  phone  calls  to  anyone  in  your 
network."^^'^  This  is  the  true  picture  of  the  social  web.  When  we  socialize  on 
SocialEyes,  the  world  becomes  a  gigantically  transparent  set  of  Hollywood 
Squares  and  we  all  become  cubes  inside  its  wall. 

You'll  remember  that  @quixotic  once  said  that  his  goal  was  to  provide 
society  with  a  lens  to  who  are  we  and  who  should  we  be,  as  individuals  and 
as  members  of  society.  And  that,  I'm  afraid,  is  all  too  literally  what  new  net- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  45 

works  like  SocialEyes  are  doing.  The  emergence  of  this  sociahzed  economy, 
with  its  powerful  lens  directed  upon  society  and  its  tens  of  billions  of  dollars 
of  investment  appears  now,  for  better  or  worse,  unstoppable. 

So  what,  exactly,  are  we  telling  the  world  when  we  use  networks  like  Rob 
Glaser's  SocialEyes,  the  "social  serendipity  engine"  Shaker  or  Sean  Parker's 
Airtime — the  social  network,  you'll  remember,  designed,  in  Parker's  words, 
to  "eliminate  loneliness." 

"Snoop  on  me"  we  are  saying.  Snoop  on  me  we  are  all  saying,  each  time  we 
use  SocialEyes,  Airtime,  Shaker,  foursquare.  Into. now  or  the  hundreds  of 
other  Orwellian  services  and  platforms  that  reveal  what  we  are  doing  and 
thinking  to  the  world.  And  snooping  on  me  has,  indeed,  become  so  central  to 
the  Internet's  architecture  that  there  is  even  a  Web  site  called  SnoopOn.me 
which,  quite  literally,  enables  our  online  followers  to  watch  everything  we  do 
on  our  personal  computers.  Equally  chilling  is  an  app  called  Breakup  Noti- 
fier  which  tracks  people's  relationship  status  on  Facebook  and  then  alerts 
everyone  when  our  love  life  changes  and  we  become  divorced  or  single.  When 
launched  in  early  2011,  Breakup  Notifier  attracted  100,000  users  in  a  few 
hours  before,  thankfully,  being  blocked  by  Facebook.^^^ 

But  even  creepier  than  Breakup  Notifier  or  SnoopOn.me  is  Creepy,  an 
app  that  enables  us  to  track  the  exact  location  of  our  Twitter  or  Facebook 
friends  on  a  map.'^^  With  Creepy,  we  all  know  where  everybody  else  is  all  the 
time. 

The  simple  architecture  of  the  digital  Inspection-House  is  now  all  around 
us.  Has  Nineteen  Eighty-four  finally  arrived  on  all  of  our  screens? 


LET'S  GET  NAKED 

@ericgrant  A  friend  is  waiting  for  a  friend  while  she  gets  an  abortion  and  he's 
texting  me  about  it.  Why  does  that  make  me  uncomfortable^'} 


Own  life 

Yes,  it  all  seems  so  chillingly  Orwellian.  George  Orwell  would  have  probably 
agreed  with  @quixotic  that  the  future  is  always  sooner  and  stranger  than  we 
think.  Writing  in  1948,  Orwell  imagined  a  future  in  which  SnoopOn.me 
and  the  Creepy  app  had  become  the  law.  "In  principle  a  Party  member  had 
no  spare  time,  and  was  never  alone  except  in  bed,"  Orwell  wrote  in  Nineteen- 
Eighty-four.  "It  was  assumed  that  when  he  was  not  working,  eating,  or  sleep- 
ing he  would  be  taking  part  in  some  kind  of  communal  recreation:  to  do 
anything  that  suggested  a  taste  for  solitude,  even  to  go  for  a  walk  by  yourself, 
was  always  slightly  dangerous.  There  was  a  neologism  for  it  in  Newspeak: 
Ownlife,  it  was  called,  meaning  individualism  and  eccentricity."^ 

And  there  was  another  neologism  in  Newspeak:  "facecrime,"  Orwell 
coined  it.  "It  was  terribly  dangerous  to  let  your  thoughts  wander  when  you 
were  in  any  public  place  or  within  range  of  a  telescreen,"  he  wrote.  "The 
smallest  thing  could  give  you  away.  A  nervous  tic,  an  unconscious  look  of 
anxiety,  a  habit  of  muttering  to  yourself— anything  that  carried  with  it  the 
suggestion  of  abnormality,  of  having  something  to  hide.  In  any  case,  to  wear 
an  improper  expression  on  your  face  (to  look  incredulous  when  a  victory  was 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  47 

announced,  for  example)  was  itself  a  punishable  offence.  There  was  even  a 
word  for  it  in  Newspeak:  facecrime,  it  was  called." 

Yes,  as  Christopher  Hitchens  reminds  us,  Orwell  still  "matters."^  On 
January  22,  1984,  to  celebrate  the  introduction  of  the  Apple  Macintosh,  the 
world's  first  real  personal  computer,  Ridley  Scott's  iconic  Super  Bowl  XVIII 
commercial  told  us  "why  1984  won't  be  1984."'*  But  that  may  have  been  be- 
cause "1984"  got  delayed  a  quarter  of  a  century.  Unfortunately,  today,  in  the 
midst  of  the  contemporary  social  media  revolution,  Ownlife  is  once  again  in 
trouble.  But  Newspeak's  "facecrime"  has  been  turned  on  its  head  in  our 
world  of  endless  tweets,  check-ins  and  status  updates.  In  Nineteen  Eighty- 
four,  it  was  a  crime  to  express  yourself;  today,  it  is  becoming  unfashionable, 
perhaps  even  socially  unacceptable  not  to  express  oneself  on  the  network. 

Instead  of  Big  Brother,  what  exists  in  today's  age  of  great  exhibitionism 
is  what  the  American  novelist  Walter  Kirn  calls,  a  "vast  cohort  of  prankish 
Little  Brothers  equipped  with  devices  that  Orwell,  writing  60  years  ago, 
never  dreamed  of  and  who  are  loyal  to  no  organized  authority."^  Kirn's  "Lit- 
tle Brothers"  are  all  of  us,  the  people — the  peeps,  in  both  form  and  function — 
whose  smartphones,  tablets  and  billions  of  other  so-called  "post-PC"  devices 
put  as  much  surveillance  technology  in  each  of  our  hands  as  Orwell  gave  Big 
Brother's  entire  regime  in  Nineteen  Eighty-four. 

We — you  and  I — are  the  loci  of  twenty-first-century  power.  Our  personal 
expressions  and  feelings  are,  in  the  words  of  British  filmmaker  Adam  Curtis, 
the  "driving  belief  of  our  time."  Personalized  social  networks  are  thus,  ac- 
cording to  Curtis,  the  "natural  center  of  the  world"  and  tweets  and  Facebook 
updates  "reinforce  the  feeling  that  this  is  the  natural  way  to  be."*^ 

Early  twenty-first-century  networks  like  SocialEyes,  Shaker  and  Airtime 
reverse  Big  Brother's  telescreen,  so  that  everyone  becomes  a  cube  in  the  wall 
both  watching  and  being  watched  by  every  other  cube.  "The  invasion  of 
privacy — of  others'  privacy  but  also  our  own,  as  we  turn  our  lenses  on  our- 
selves in  the  quest  for  attention  by  any  means — has  been  democratized," 


48  ANDREW  KEEN 

Walter  Kirn  argues/  He  is  right.  In  the  industrial  age,  the  ideal  of  privacy 
was  taken  for  granted  as  the  dominant  cultural  norm,  but  today,  as  we-the- 
peeps  turn  the  telescreen  on  ourselves  so  that  everyone  can  watch  us,  it  is  Jeff 
Jarvis's  cacophonic  ideal  of  publicness  that's  becoming  the  default  mode  of 
existence. 

"Privacy  is  taking  a  back  seat  to  the  notion  that  our  every  thought,  act  or 
desire  should  be  publicized,"  confirms  University  of  Southern  California's 
social  media  research  scientist  Dr.  Julie  Albright.  "Our  social  lives  are  be- 
coming more  transparent  and  public,  and  a  lot  of  people  don't  really  con- 
sider the  fact  that  once  it's  out  there,  it's  out  there."  ^ 

The  Age  of  Networked  Intelligence 

Yet  for  the  wired  intelligentsia  seeking  to  "reboot"  the  human  condition, 
this  increasingly  transparent  network — @quixotic's  Web  3.0  and  John  Do- 
err's  third  wave  of  technological  innovation,  represents  an  unambiguously 
positive  development  in  the  evolution  of  mankind.  As  one  digital  engineer  of 
the  human  soul,  social  media  evangelist  Umair  Haque,  argued  in  the  Har- 
vard Business  Review,  the  "promise  of  the  Internet . . .  was  to  fundamentally 
rewire  people,  communities,  civil  society,  business  and  the  state — through 
thicker,  stronger,  more  meaningful  relationships.  That's  where  the  future  of 
media  lies."^ 

But  even  the  clownlike  Haque,  who  describes  himself  to  his  over  100,000 
Twitter  follows  as  an  "advisor  to  revolutionaries"^^  and  was  ranked  by  the  Lon- 
don Independent  newspaper  the  fifth  most  influential  member  of  the  United 
Kingdom's  Twitter  "elite"  (sandwiched,  appropriately  enough,  between  the 
two  comedians  Russell  Brand  and  Stephen  Fry),^^  doesn't  quite  grasp  the  ep- 
ochal significance  of  today's  revolution  of  invasive  social  networks  like  Plan- 
cast,  Airtime,  Hitlist,  SocialEyes  and  foursquare.  Rather  than  just  the  future 
of  media,  the  twenty-first-century  electronic  network  might  actually  represent 
the  post-industrial  future  of  everything. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  49 


As  best-selling  digital  evangelists  Don  Tapscott^^  and  Anthony  D.  Wil- 
liams argue  in  their  2010  book  MacroWikinomicsP  today's  Internet  repre- 
sents "a  turning  point  in  history."  We  are  entering  what  they  call  "the  age  of 
networked  intelligence,"  a  "titanic"  historic  shift,  they  pronounce,  equiva- 
lent to  the  "birth  of  the  modern  nation-state"  or  the  Renaissance.^'^  Mark 
Pincus's  always-on  social  dial  tone,  Tapscott  and  Williams  argue,  represents 
a  "platform  for  the  networking  human  minds"  that  will  enable  us  "to  col- 
laborate and  to  learn  collectively."  Echoing  Mark  Zuckerberg's  five-year 
vision  of  social  media's  revolutionary  impact  on  the  broader  economy,  Tap- 
scott and  Williams  predict  that  politics,  education,  energy,  banking,  health- 
care and  corporate  life  will  all  be  transformed  by  what  these  social  Utopians 
embrace  as  the  "openness"  and  "sharing"  of  the  networked  intelligence  age. 

Silicon  Valley's  king  of  connections,  Reid  Hoffman,  shares  Tapscott  and 
William's  faith  in  this  new  social  economy.  At  our  Oxford  breakfast,  he  in- 
sisted that  network  transparency  rewarded  integrity.  When  everything  is 
discoverable,  the  former  Marshall  Scholar  in  moral  philosophy  explained  to 
me,  a  trust  economy  will  emerge  in  which  our  reputations  will  be  determined 
by  what  others  think  of  us.  Networks  like  his  own  Linkedin,  @quixotic 
predicts,  will  help  create  a  truer  meritocracy  by  exposing  disreputable  indi- 
viduals and  by  rewarding  those  with  proven  integrity.  Rather  than  becoming 
the  "global  village"  predicted  by  the  twentieth-century  communications 
guru  Marshall  McLuhan,  then,  the  world  will  shrink  into  a  version  of  a  pre- 
modern  village — a  universal  digital  dorm  room  in  which  everyone  will  know 
everything  about  our  slightest,  most  hidden  or,  I'm  afraid,  our  most  imagi- 
nary actions. 

This  universal  dorm  room  already  exists.  On  today's  Internet,  anonymity — 
for  better  or  worse — is  dead.  "These  Days  the  Web  Unmasks  Everyone," 
screamed  a  June  2011  headline  in  The  New  York  Times.  "The  collective  intel- 
ligence of  the  Internet's  2  billion  users,  and  the  digital  fingerprints  that  so 
many  users  leave  on  Web  sites,  combine  to  make  it  more  and  more  likely  that 


50  ANDREW  KEEN 

every  embarrassing  video,  every  intimate  photo,  and  every  indelicate  e-mail  is 
attributed  to  its  source,  whether  that  source  wants  it  to  be  or  not.  This  intel- 
ligence makes  the  public  sphere  more  public  than  ever  before  and  sometimes 
forces  personal  lives  into  public  view,"  explains  The  Times  social  media  guru 
Brian  Stelter.^^ 

At  the  heart  of  this  increasingly  transparent  and  networked  world  will 
be  what  the  social  ideologists  call  "reputation  banks."  "Now  with  the  web 
we  leave  a  reputation  trail,"  Rachel  Botsford  and  Roo  Rogers  recognize  in 
their  collaborative  consumption  manifesto  What's  Mine  Is  Yours:  How  Col- 
laborative Consumption  Is  Changing  the  Way  We  Live.  "With  every  seller  we 
rate;  spammer  we  flag;  comment  we  leave;  idea,  comment,  video  or  photo  we 
post;  peer  we  review,  we  leave  a  cumulative  record  of  how  well  we  collabo- 
rate and  if  we  can  be  trusted."*^ 

But  Botsford,  Rogers,  Tapscott,  Williams  and  the  rest  of  the  social  media 
quixotics  are  wrong  that  the  Internet  is  resulting  in  a  new  age  of  "networked 
intelligence."  In  fact,  the  reverse  may  well  be  true.  From  Zuckerberg's  Face- 
book,  Hoffman's  Linkedin  and  Stone's  Twitter  to  SocialEyes,  SocialCam, 
foursquare,  ImageSocial,  Instagram,  Living  Social  and  the  myriad  of  other 
digital  drivers  of  John  Doerr's  third  great  wave,  the  network  is  creating  more 
social  conformity  and  herd  behavior.  "Men  aren't  sheep,"  argued  John  Stuart 
Mill,  the  nineteenth  century's  greatest  critic  of  Benthamite  utilitarianism,  in 
his  1859  defense  of  individual  freedom  On  Liberty}^  Yet  on  the  social 
network,  we  seem  to  be  thinking  and  behaving  more  and  more  like  sheep, 
making  what  cultural  critic  Neil  Strauss  describes  as  "the  need  to  belong,"^^ 
rather  than  genuine  nonconformity,  the  rule. 

"While  the  Web  has  enabled  new  forms  of  collective  action,  it  has  also 
enabled  new  kinds  of  collective  stupidity,"  argues  Jonas  Lehrer,  a  contribut- 
ing editor  to  Wired  magazine  and  a  best-selling  writer  on  both  neuroscience 
and  psychology.  "Groupthink  is  now  more  more  widespread,  as  we  cope 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  51 


with  the  excess  of  available  information  by  outsourcing  our  beliefs  to  celeb- 
rities, pundits  and  Facebook  friends.  Instead  of  thinking  for  ourselves,  we 
simply  cite  what's  already  been  cited."^^ 

The  degeneration  of  "the  smart  group"  into  what  Lehrer  calls  "the  dumb 
herd"  can  be  increasingly  seen  in  Web  3.0  networks.  Take,  for  example,  the 
Silicon  Valley  network,  AngelList,  designed  to  build  what  it  calls  "social 
proof"  for  technology  entrepreneurs  and  angel  investors.  Yet,  as  Bryce  Rob- 
erts, the  co-founder  of  O'Reilly  AlphaTech  Ventures  argues,  in  a  controver- 
sial explanation  of  why  he  deleted  his  AngelList  account,'^^  "  'social  proof  is 
turning  into  a  form  of  peer  pressure  where  angels  feel  compelled  to  invest  for 
fear  of  missing  the  boat  everyone  else  is  getting  on."  Roberts  isn't  alone  in  his 
skepticism  about  the  value  of  social  proof  Another  AngelList  sceptic,  GRP 
Partners  venture  capitalist  Mark  Suster  agreed,  adding  "my  biggest  fear  is  that 
people  confuse  the  'social  proof  of  other  prominent  investors  on  AngelList 
for  real  insight."^^ 

But  Jonas  Lehrer  reminds  us  that  real  insight  means  "thinking  for  one- 
self"— something  that,  in  spite  of  the  messianic  promise  that  we  are  on  the 
verge  of  an  age  of  networked  intelligence,  is  increasingly  in  short  supply  on 
today's  social  Web. 

Yes,  in  a  social  media  world  dominated  by  Lehrer's  Groupthink,  "think- 
ing for  oneself"  is  increasingly  scarce.  "The  crowd  was  at  the  heart  of  some 
of  the  most  memorable  events  of  2011,  demonstrating  the  power  of  the 
group  driven  by  common  identity  and  capacity  for  decision-making,"  thus 
noted  the  Financial  Times  about  a  year  defined  by  the  collective  actions  of 
the  Arab  Spring,  the  London  riots  and  the  Occupy  Wall  Street  movement. 
"They  are  classic  examples  of  the  herd  mentality — the  shared  and  self- 
regulated  thinking  of  individuals  in  a  group."'^^ 

Or  as  David  Carr  (@carr2n).  The  New  York  Times  media  critic,  tweeted 
(thereby  truly  uniting  the  collective  medium  with  its  message):  "Twitter  =  a 


52  ANDREW  KEEN 

convention  of  charming  exhibitionists  w/a  lot  on  their  minds.  Mass  exter- 
nalization  of  thought  creates  hive  mind." 

Let's  Get  Naked 

At  the  March  2011  South  By  Southwest  conference,  in  a  speech  entitled 
"Let's  Get  Naked:  Benefits  of  Publicness  versus  Privacy,"  Jeffjarvis  argued 
that  the  social  media  revolution  is  returning  us  to  a  preindustrial  "oral 
culture"  in  which  we  will  all  share  more  and  more  information  about  our 
real  selves.  This  "publicness,"  for  Jarvis,  will  result  in  a  more  tolerant  soci- 
ety because  everything  will  be  known  about  everyone  and  thus  traditional 
social  taboos,  such  as  homosexuality,  will  supposedly  be  undermined.  Jar- 
vis  argues  that  by  openly  revealing  their  sexual  preferences  in  the  social 
media  age,  the  homosexual  is  saying  "too  bad,  I'm  public  just  like  you."^^ 
Thus,  in  a  blog  post  published  just  before  his  speech,  Jarvis  wrote  that  "the 
best  solution  is  to  be  yourself"  Our  reputations,  he  said,  depend  on  us 
sharing  more  and  more  of  our  identity  with  the  world.  "An  act  of  transpar- 
ency," Jarvis  quoted  Harvard  University  Berkman  Center  philosopher 
David  Weinberger,  "must  be  an  act  of  forgiveness."^^ 

Borrowing  liberally  from  the  communitarian  theories  of  German  social 
thinker  Jurgen  Habermas,  Jeffjarvis  argues  that  social  media  offers  us  the  op- 
portunity to  rebuild  the  so-called  "public  sphere"  of  the  eighteenth-century 
coffee  house.  But  rather  than  plowing  through  the  dense  Habermas,  a  more 
instructive  author  to  read  on  the  so-called  "public"  sphere  of  preindustrial  life 
is  the  nineteenth-century  American  writer  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  whose 
chilling  novel  about  life  in  Puritan  New  England,  The  Scarlet  Letter,  deals  with 
the  prudery  of  small-town  society  in  which  individuals  who  just  want  to  be 
themselves  have  little,  if  any  privacy  from  the  gaze  of  the  intolerant  collective. 

One  doesn't  need  to  go  back  to  seventeenth-century  Boston  to  excavate 
the  Scarlet  Letter.  Today,  it  can  be  found  on  the  Internet,  on  social  forums 
like  Topix,  where  the  lynch  mob  has  publicly  demonized  individuals  who 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  53 

have  yet  to  be  proven  guilty  of  any  crime.  The  New  York  Times  notes  that 
rural  America's  use  of  social  media  is  often  characterized  by  "hubs  of  unsub- 
stantiated gossip,  stirring  widespread  resentment  in  communities  where  ties 
run  deep,  memories  run  long  and  anonymity  is  something  of  a  novel  con- 
cept."^^  In  the  small  town  of  Mountain  Grove,  Missouri,  for  example,  one 
mother  of  two  was  accused  on  Topix  of  being  a  "freak"  and  "a  methed-out, 
doped  out  whore  with  AIDS."^^  And  the  problem  with  rural  America  and 
the  Internet  is  both  have  very  long  memories.  "In  a  small  town,"  one  Mountain 
Grove  victim  of  online  gossip  explains,  "rumors  stay  forever."^'' 

Or  take,  for  example,  what  Time  magazine  calls  "the  social  media  trial  of 
the  century" — the  trial  in  Orlando,  Florida,  of  young  mother  Casey  Anthony, 
accused  of  murdering  her  two-year-old  daughter  Caylee.  Time  describes  the 
legal  case  as  being  "astonishingly  weak,"  but  that  didn't  stop  the  online  mob 
transforming  social  media  into  "arenas  for  mass,  lip-licking  bloodlust"  domi- 
nated by  Facebook  comments  like:  "think  im  gonna  puke  in  my  mouth  over 
them  trying  to  get  an  acquittal  shes  GAULITY  GAULITY  GAULITY!!! 
Justice  for  Cayee."^^ 

Tragically,  the  ideal  of  the  universal  dorm  room  and  Jarvis's  advice  to  "get 
naked"  are  more  than  just  silly  metaphors  about  life  on  the  digital  network. 
In  the  Web  3.0  world,  transparency  doesn't  always  reward  integrity.  The 
truth  is  that  social  media's  open  architecture  often  encourages  those  com- 
pletely lacking  in  integrity  to  wreck  the  reputations  of  innocent  people.  In- 
deed, in  our  hypervisible  age,  all  it  takes  is  a  camcorder  and  a  Skype  account 
to  actually  destroy  somebody's  life. 

On  September  19,  2010,  a  Rutgers  student  called  Dharan  Ravi  tweeted 
about  his  eighteen-year-old  dorm  roommate  Tyler  Clementi:  "Roommate 
asked  for  the  room  till  midnight.  I  went  into  Molly's  room  and  turned  on 
my  webcam.  I  saw  him  making  out  with  a  dude.  Yay."  A  few  days  later,  after 
Ravi  had  Skyped  a  live  video  feed  of  Clementi  "making  out  with  a  dude,"  the 
young  man  posted  on  his  Facebook  page:  "Jumping  ofFthe  gw  bridge  sorry." 


ANDREW  KEEN 


The  body  of  the  accomplished  violinist,  a  victim  of  what  Walter  Kirn  calls 
"Little  Brother  in  the  form  of  a  prying  roommate  with  a  camera,"^^  was 
found  in  the  Hudson  River  underneath  the  George  Washington  Bridge  by 
police  on  September  29. 

Therein  lies  Umair  Haque's  "thicker,  stronger,  more  meaningful  relation- 
ships" of  our  hypervisible  age.  Social  Utopians  like  Haque,  Tapscott  and  Jar- 
vis  are,  of  course,  wrong.  The  age  of  networked  intelligence  isn't  very 
intelligent.  The  tragic  truth  is  that  getting  naked,  being  yourself  in.  the  full 
public  gaze  of  today's  digital  network,  doesn't  always  result  in  the  breaking 
down  of  ancient  taboos.  There  is  little  evidence  that  networks  like  Facebook, 
Skype  and  Twitter  are  making  us  any  more  forgiving  or  tolerant.  Indeed,  if 
anything,  these  viral  tools  of  mass  exposure  seem  to  be  making  society  not 
only  more  prurient  and  voyeuristic,  but  also  fuelling  a  mob  culture  of  intoler- 
ance, schadenfreude  and  revengefulness. 

Inevitably,  much  of  this  prurience  focuses  on  the  physical  act  of  getting 
naked.  One  hypervisible  American  politican,  Anthony  Weiner,  the  Demo- 
cratic congressman  from  New  York,  published  pornographic  photos  of  him- 
self on  Twitter  and  engaged  in  erotic  conversations  with  women  he  met  on 
Facebook  and  Twitter  (some  of  whom  were  fake  identities  created  by  his  Re- 
publican enemies),^*^  a  story  that  even  the  normally  circumspect  New  York 
Times  greeted  with  the  headline  "Naked  Hubris."^^  Another,  New  York  Re- 
publican congressman  Christopher  Lee,  sent  suggestive  photographs  of 
himself  to  a  woman  he  met  on  Craigslist.  After  these  photographs  were  pub- 
lished on  the  Internet,  the  social  media  hysteria  over  this  inappropriate  but 
not  illegal  behavior  resulted  in  the  destruction  of  both  politicians'  reputa- 
tions and  a  collective  stench  of  vindictive  self-congratulation.  Then  there  is 
the  case  of  Ryan  Giggs,  a  prominent  Welsh  soccer  player,  who  supposedly  had 
an  extramarital  affair  with  Big  Brother  reality  television  star  Imogen  Thomas. 
In  spite  of  a  British  High  Court  super  injunction  against  broadcasting  this 
information,  75,000  people  tweeted  Gigg's  identity — an  electronic  mob 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  55 

clearly  intent  on  humiliating  a  gifted  sportsman  who  had  done  none  of  them 
any  personal  harm  nor  broken  any  law. 

The  problem  is  more  cultural  than  technological.  As  National  Public  Ra- 
dio's executive  editor  Dick  Meyer  argues  in  his  perceptive  2008  book  Why 
We  Hate  Us,  we  live  in  "an  age  of  self-loathing"  in  which  "everyone  is  part  of 
a  counterculture."^^  Today's  Zeitgeist  is  a  corrosive  hostility  toward  all  forms 
of  authority — from  politicians  like  Christopher  Lee  and  Anthony  Weiner  to 
sporting  superstars  like  Ryan  Giggs  and  Lebron  James^^  to  reality  television 
icons  like  Imogen  Thomas.  Thus,  the  supposedly  tolerant  social  networks  of 
JefFjarvis's  dream  are,  in  fact,  fuelling  the  corrosive  belligerence  that  has  in- 
fected much  of  the  snarky,  gotcha  public  discourse  in  contemporary  society. 

This  belligerent  cynicism  is  not  only  ugly,  but  can  also  be  self-destructive. 
In  a  WikiLeaks  culture  where  we  all  now  have  Twitter  and  Facebook  accounts, 
many  of  us  are  tempted  to  become  mini  Julian  Assanges  and  publicly  inform 
on  our  bosses,  our  companies  and  sometimes  even  our  clients  or  our  pupils. 
But  the  problem  is  that  none  of  us  actually  are  Assange,  with  the  resources 
to  skip  international  justice  and  avoid  the  consequences  of  our  actions. 

"Twitter  is  a  danger  zone,"  warns  Time  columnist  James  Poniewozik,  "es- 
pecially for  its  most  adept  users."^"^  Thus,  from  a  couple  of  Canadian  car  work- 
ers dismissed  in  August  2010  for  writing  critical  comments  on  Facebook 
about  the  safety  records  of  their  dealerships^^  to  the  British  teenagers  sacked 
in  February  2009  for  describing  her  boss  on  Facebook  as  "boring"^^  to  the 
New  York  City  math  schoolteacher  who  was  fired  in  February  2010  for  saying 
on  Facebook  that  she  hated  her  students'  guts  and  wished  they  would  drown,^^ 
to  the  voice  of  the  Aflac  duck  fired  for  tweeting  jokes  about  the  2011  Japanese 
tsunami,^^  to  the  British  plumber  on  trial  for  tweeting  about  his  wife's  alleged 
extramarital  afFair,^^  to  the  eleven-year-old  girl  in  southern  England  who 
posted  sexually  derogatory  messages  on  a  ten-year-old  friend's  Facebook 
account,"^^  to  the  11,000  menacing  tweets  posted  about  a  Maryland  Buddhist 
leader  by  a  fellow  Buddhist,^^  we  are  finding  that  JefFjarvis's  call  to  "get 


ANDREW  KEEN 


naked"  and  broadcast  our  honest  opinions  on  the  network  results  not  in 
forgiveness  or  more  personal  integrity,  but  instead  in  unemployment,  crimi- 
nal charges  and  public  humiliation. 

In  1940,  eight  years  before  he  wrote  Nineteen  Eighty-four,  George 
Orwell  wrote  an  essay  entitled  "Inside  the  Whale"  in  which,  noting  that 
"the  ordinary  man"  is  "passive,"  he  argued  that  professional  writers  should 
be  actively  engaged  in  the  social  issues  of  their  day.  "The  whale's  belly  is  sim- 
ply a  womb  big  enough  for  an  adult,"  Orwell  wrote.  "There  you  are,  in  the 
dark,  cushioned  space  that  exactly  fits  you,  with  yards  of  blubber  between 
yourself  and  reality,  able  to  keep  up  an  attitude  of  the  completest  indiffer- 
ence, no  matter  what  happens.""^^ 

But  just  as  a  networked  mob  of  twenty-first-century  small  brothers  have 
replaced  Orwell's  solitary  twentieth-century  Big  Brother,  so  the  passivity  of 
being  inside  the  whale  has  been  replaced  in  our  social  media  age  by  the 
crude  mindlessness  of  much  so-called  public  discourse.  Orwell  was  right,  in 
1940,  to  critique  people  who  retreat  inside  the  whale;  but  if  he  was  around 
today,  with  75,000  people  on  Twitter  illegally  broadcasting  the  intimate 
details  of  a  stranger's  sex  life  and  the  tens  of  thousands  of  people  baying  for 
the  blood  of  a  young  woman  who  hasn't  been  proven  guilty  of  any  crime, 
one  wonders  if  Orwell  would  have  been  so  critical  of  those  "yards  of  blub- 
ber," that  "dark,  cushioned  space"  that  separates  us  from  what  he  called  "re- 
ality." 

Zuckerberg's  Law 

In  January  2011,  four  months  after  Tyler  Clementi  jumped  off  the  George 
Washington  Bridge,  a  couple  of  Silicon  Valley  entrepreneurs  released  a  geo- 
location  app  called  WhereTheLadies.at  which  enables  men  to  aggregate 
foursquare  data  to  track  local  bars  or  clubs  popular  with  women.  And  a 
couple  of  months  after  that,  some  other  entrepreneurs  started  up  Whoworks. 
at,  an  app  that — deploying  Linkedin  data — reveals  where  we  work. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  57 

Yet,  instead  of  WhereTheLadies.at  or  Whoworks.at,  what  really  lies  on 
the  five-year  horizon  is  Wherel'm.at.  That's  the  Orwellian  future  of  the  In- 
ternet. WhereVm.at — however  chilling  for  those  of  us  who  still  cherish  our 
illegibility — is  being  embraced  in  Silicon  Valley  where  Ownlife  has  already 
been  dumped  into  the  dustbin  of  history.  @quixotic  is  far  from  alone  in  de- 
claring privacy  to  be  dead.  "The  progression  toward  a  more  public  society  is 
apparent  and  inevitable,"  predicts  the  gleefully  deterministic  Jeff  Jarvis 
about  our  hypervisible  age.'*^  And  technology  titans  like  Google  executive 
chairman  Eric  Schmidt,  Oracle  CEO  Larry  Ellison,  ex-Sun  Microsystems 
CEO  Scott  McNealy,  Techcrunch  founder  Mike  Arrington  and  social  me- 
dia uber-evangelist  Robert  Scoble  all  concur,  declaring  privacy  to  be  little 
more  than  a  corpse.  While  Sean  Parker,  Facebook's  first  president  whose 
new  company,  you'll  remember,  is  planning  to  eliminate  loneliness,  says 
simply  that  privacy  "isn't  an  issue.'"^"*  In  the  twenty-first  century,  they  agree, 
all  information  will  be  shared.  Individual  privacy  is  a  relic,  they  say.  It  has  a 
past,  but  no  future. 

For  many  of  these  supposed  visionaries,  the  death  of  privacy  is  no  differ- 
ent, in  principle,  from  the  retirement  of  the  horse  and  cart  or  the  disappear- 
ance of  gaslights  from  city  streets.  "Today's  creepy  is  tomorrow's  necessity," 
Sean  Parker  thus  argues.  The  disappearance  of  privacy  is  a  casualty  of  prog- 
ress, Parker  and  his  fellow  entrepreneurs  promise  us,  just  another  conse- 
quence of  technological  change.  Yet  these  entrepreneurs  and  futurists  are 
blinkered  by  their  ability  to  only  look  forward,  onto  that  five-,  ten-,  or  fifi:y- 
year  horizon.  They  have  no  interest  or  knowledge  in  the  history  of  privacy, 
in  the  intimate  connection  between  individual  liberty  and  individual  auton- 
omy, in  the  consequences  on  Ownlife  of  today's  universal  digital  dormroom. 

"Expressing  our  authentic  identity  will  become  even  more  pervasive  in 
the  coming  year,"  thus  projects  Facebook's  Chief  Operating  Officer,  Sheryl 
Sandberg,  about  the  continued  demise  of  individual  privacy  in  2012 — a  de- 
velopment from  which,  of  course  she  and  her  company  will  radically  profit. 


58  ANDREW  KEEN 

"Profiles  will  no  longer  be  outlines,  but  detailed  self-portraits  of  who  we  re- 
ally are,  including  the  books  we  read,  the  music  we  listen  to,  the  distances  we 
run,  the  places  we  travel,  the  causes  we  support,  the  video  of  cats  we  laugh  at, 
our  likes  and  our  links.  And  yes,  this  shift  to  authenticity  will  take  getting 
used  to  and  will  elicit  cries  of  lost  privacy.'"^^ 

This  banal  unsentimentality  about  privacy's  corpse  is  encapsulated  by 
Scott  McNealy  who,  as  early  as  1999,  said,  "you  have  zero  privacy  anyway — 
get  over  it."  Eric  Schmidt,  the  ex- Google  CEO  who  confessed  to  "screwing 
up"  the  company's  social  networking  strategy,^^  even  had  the  audacity  to 
say,  in  response  to  a  question  about  his  company's  right  to  retain  our  per- 
sonal data,  that  anyone  concerned  with  online  privacy  had  "something  to 
hide."  "If  you  don't  want  anyone  to  know,"  the  willfully  empirical  Schmidt 
said,  with  classic  Benthamite  ignorance  about  the  complexity  of  the  human 
condition,  "don't  do  it."^''  In  August  2010  the  former  Google  CEO  even 
told  the  Wall  Street  Journal  that  the  young  people  of  the  future  should  be 
"entitled  to  automatically  be  able  to  change  his  or  her  name  on  reaching  adult- 
hood" because  of  all  the  incriminating  online  information  about  them."^^ 

Most  ominously  of  all,  the  social  media  revolution's  chief-rewiring- 
officer,  Facebook  co-founder  and  CEO  Mark  Zuckerberg — whose  company 
is  developing  the  utilitarian  Gross  Happiness  Index  to  quantify  global 
sentiment^^ — has  not  only  declared  the  age  of  privacy  to  be  over^°  but  has 
also  invented  his  own  historical  law  to  explain  this  dramatic  change  in  so- 
cial life.  "I  would  expect  that  next  year,  people  will  share  twice  as  much  in- 
formation as  they  share  this  year,  and  next  year,  they  will  be  sharing  twice  as 
much  as  they  did  the  year  before,"  thus,  he  mapped  out  his  own  eponymous 
law.^^ 

"Zuckerberg's  Law"  is  one  which  its  young  author  wants,  in  every  sense, 
to  own.  At  the  Facebook  f8  Conference  in  April  2010,  he  laid  out  his  vision 
of  transforming  the  Web  into  a  series  of  "instantly  social  experiences"  tied 
together  by  the  company's  Open-Graph  and  Social  Plugins  technology. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  59 

Zuckerberg  told  the  conference  that  "we  are  building  a  web  where  the  default 
is  social."^^ 

A  year  later,  at  the  September  20 11  f8  conference,  Mark  Zuckerberg  gave 
his  eponymous  law  what  Liz  Cannes,  AllThingsD's  social  media  expert,  de- 
scribed as  "a  big  push."^^  Adding  something  called  "Frictionless  Sharing"  to 
his  Open  Graph  integration,  Zuckerberg  is,  in  the  ominous  words  of  serial 
Silicon  Valley  entrepreneur  Ben  Elowitz,  "boldly  annexing  the  web"  by  es- 
tablishing a  "social  operating  system"  which  will  turn  Facebook  into  "the 
hub  for  every  user's  action — watching  a  video,  reviewing  a  recipe,  reading  an 
article,  and  much  more."^'^ 

Facebook 's  new  social  operating  system,  introduced  at  the  2011  f8,  is 
designed,  according  to  the  scrupulously  impartial  journalism  site  Poynter, 
to  turn  "sharing  into  a  thoughtless  process  in  which  everything  we  read, 
watch  or  listen  to  is  shared  with  our  friends  automatically."^^  Zuckerberg's 
goal  with  Frictionless  Sharing  on  the  Open  Graph  is  to  encourage  its  hun- 
dreds of  millions  of  members  to  automatically  share  what  they  are  reading 
on  the  London  Guardian  and  Wall  Street  Journal,  what  they  are  listening  to 
on  Spotify  and  Rhapsody,  what  they  are  watching  on  YouTube  and  Hulu, 
and  where  exactly  they  happen  to  be  driving,  flying,  eating,  or  sleeping. 

"If  you  read  articles  in  The  New  York  Times,  for  instance,  Facebook  will 
begin  to  know  your  interests,  your  views,  your  reading  habits,  your  diversity 
of  views,  your  passions  and  pursuits,  as  well  as  the  friends  you  are  sharing 
the  material  with.  It  will  know  what  you  encounter — and  also  what  you 
want  to  encounter,"  warns  Ben  Elowitz.  "This  is  a  massive  change  from  the 
status  quo."^^ 

No  wonder  that  the  headline  in  the  Financial  Times  about  the  Open 
Graph  advises  us  to  "take  care  how  you  share"^^  or  that  the  parallel  headline 
on  AllThingsD  warns  us  to  "prepare  for  the  oversharing  explosion."''^  No 
wonder,  either,  that  Poynter  worries  about  the  "chilling  effect"  of  this  over- 
sharing  on  "online  privacy"^^  or  that  Ben  Werd,  CTO  of  the  video  streaming 


60  ANDREW  KEEN 

Start-Up  Latakoo  describes  it  as  "undeniably  creepy,  to  a  level  we've  been  hith- 
erto unprepared  for  in  human  society."^^ 

Equally  creepy,  is  Facebook's  introduction  in  December  2011  of  "Time- 
line," a  feature  that,  according  the  New  York  Times's  Jenna  Wortham, 
"makes  a  user's  entire  history  of  photos,  links  and  other  things  on  Facebook 
accessible  with  a  single  click."  As  Wortham  notes.  Timeline  will  "make  it 
harder  to  shed  past  identities,"  to  reinvent  oneself  and  thus  to  forget  the 
past.  "All  the  mouse  droppings  that  appear  as  we  migrate  around  the  Web 
will  be  saved,"  warns  Harvard  law  professor  Jonathan  Zittrain  about  a  prod- 
uct that  grants  Mark  Zuckerberg  possession  of  our  most  precious  thing — 
the  story  of  our  lives. ^^  Perhaps  it's  no  wonder  then  that  in  2011  Forbes 
magazine  ranked  Zuckerberg,  the  owner  of  all  our  life  histories,  the  ninth 
most  powerful  person  in  the  world,  more  powerful  than  either  the  British 
Prime  Minister,  the  Presidents  of  Brazil,  France  and  India  or  the  Pope.*^^ 

Facebook's  Open  Graph  integration  and  Timeline  feature  what  is  known, 
in  Silicon  Valley,  as  a  "platform  play."  By  sticking  Facebook  Connect  plug-ins 
and  buttons  on  every  Web  site  and  mobile  app,  by  automating  the  broadcast 
of  our  online  media  consumption  through  frictionless  sharing,  and  by  ac- 
cessing our  lives  with  a  single  click,  Facebook  is  trying  to  own  the  social  web. 
And  owning  this  social  web  means  owning  all  of  us,  too.  "By  knowing  us 
intimately — who  we  are,  what  we  do,  and  what  our  interests  are — Facebook 
is  in  the  position  to  answer  our  every  desire,"  explains  Ben  Elowitz  about  this 
new  social  operating  system. ''^  And  that's  why  Mark  Zuckerberg's  private 
company  was  valued  by  Goldman  Sachs  in  January  2011  at  over  $50  bil- 
lion,^'^  which  is  more  than  the  annual  GDP  of  80  percent  of  African 
countries^^ — a  price  the  financial  writer  William  D.  Cohan  described  as 
"vertigo-inducing,"^^  yet  one  that  authoritative  business  journalists  in 
both  The  Financial  Times  and  The  Wall  Street  Journal  believe  could  turn 
out  to  be  a  "bargain"  because  of  the  increasingly  ubiquity  of  social  me- 
dia.^^  These  Facebook  bulls  may  well  be  right.  By  late  March  2011,  Face- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  61 


book's  value  had  surged  to  $85  billion^^  with  some  even  predicting  that 
the  Mark  Zuckerberg  production  will  eventually  top  $100  billion  after  its 
2012  IPO. 

As  Facebook  historian  David  Kirkpatrick  argues,  "Facebook  is  ft^unded 
on  a  radical  social  premise — that  an  inevitable  enveloping  transparency  will 
overtake  modern  life."^^  In  this  zeal  ft)r  radical  transparency,  Zuckerberg, 
Sandberg,  and  the  other  Silicon  Valley  social  media  moguls  and  evangelists 
are  today's  utilitarian  social  reformers.  Like  Jeremy  Bentham,  these  enlight- 
ened pied  pipers  of  great  exhibitionism  promise  that  by  separating  us  as  indi- 
vidual nodes  on  the  collective  network,  digital  technology  can  bring  us 
together  for  the  benefit  both  of  society  and  of  the  individual.  Like  Bentham's 
Inspection-House,  this  is  presented  as  a  virtuous  circle — a  magical  staircase 
elevating  us  up  to  a  future  world  in  which  individual  freedom  and  social  har- 
mony are  both  abundant.  More  individual  transparency  on  the  network 
through  technologies  like  Open  Graph  and  Timeline,  social  media  ideo- 
logues promise,  leads  to  a  "healthier  society";''^  more  truth  leads  to  more  to- 
getherness, they  say;  and  more  togetherness,  their  logic  spirals,  leads  to  a 
better  society. 

But  like  Bentham's  creepy  greatest  happiness  principle,  which  reduces 
human  beings  to  simple  abacuses  of  pleasure  and  pain,  Zuckerberg's  creepy 
conception  of  individual  identity  fails  to  grasp  the  complexity  of  the  human 
condition.  Rather  than  the  mysterious  thing  at  the  heart  of  every  human 
being,  identity  for  the  young  multi  billionaire  is  as  quantifiable  as  a  line  of 
computer  code.  Like  Bentham,  Zuckerberg  is  a  "cost-benefit  expert  on  a 
grand-scale"''^  who  views  human  identity  in  the  strictly  empirical  terms  of  a 
perpetual  child. 

"You  have  one  identity.  Having  two  identities  for  yourself  is  an  example 
of  a  lack  of  integrity,"  was  thus  how  Zuckerberg — who,  of  course,  wants  to 
own  and  profit  from  that  single  identity — calculated  in  2009.^^  But  Zucker- 
berg's utilitarian  notion  of  identity,  like  Sheryl  Sandberg's  idea  of  "authentic 


62  ANDREW  KEEN 

identity"  squeezes  all  the  ambiguity  and  subtlety — the  unquantifiable 
humanness — out  of  the  human  condition. 

Take,  for  example,  MingleBird,  the  event  networking  start-up  launched 
in  February  2011,''^  that  is  designed  to  make  conference  networking  less 
awkward.  MingleBird  provides  something  called  "MingleWbrds"  that  auto- 
matically provides  users  with  the  language  to  meet  strangers  at  events.  On 
MingleBird  life  is  turned  into  a  childish  game,  a  quantifiably  Huxleyan 
world  in  which  social  awkwardness — that  most  human  of  qualities — is 
replaced  with  a  networking  tool  that  not  only  automatically  introduces 
people  to  strangers  but  also  awards  them  points  if  they  then  have  their  pho- 
tos taken  together. 

Worse  still,  today's  digital  network  is  commodifying  friendship  so  that  it 
becomes,  quite  literally,  the  currency  of  the  new  social  economy.  Online  ser- 
vices like  Klout,  Peerlndex,  Kred,  and  Hashable  value  us  by  quantifying  our 
social  influence.'^^  Kleiner's  first  sFund  investment  Cafebot,  Flavor.me  and 
the  AOL-acquired  About. me^^  provide  online  platforms  for  super  nodes  to 
manage  their  assets.  There  is  even  a  "social  media  exchange"  called  Empire 
Avenue  that  has  established  a  stock  market  in  the  buying  and  selling  of  indi- 
vidual reputations. 

Wealth  equals  connectivity  in  the  Web  3.0  world.  The  more  "friends"  you 
have  on  Twitter  or  Facebook,  therefore,  the  more  potentially  valuable  you 
become  in  terms  of  getting  your  friends  to  buy  or  do  things.  We  "manage" 
our  friends  in  the  social  networking  world  in  the  same  way  as  we  "manage" 
our  assets  in  the  financial  marketplace.  "There  is  something  Orwellian  about 
the  management  speak  on  social  networking  sites,"  notes  the  ever  perceptive 
Christine  Rosen,  who  adds  that  such  terminology  encourages  "the  bureau- 
cratization of  friendship."^'' 

Yes,  George  Orwell  still  matters.  "Most  people  who  bother  with  the  mat- 
ter at  all  would  admit  that  the  English  language  is  in  a  bad  way,"  Orwell 
worried  about  the  political  and  economic  corruption  of  language  in  his 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  63 

great  1946  essay  "Politics  and  the  English  Language."'''^  But  even  the  author 
of  Newspeak  and  the  Ministry  of  Truth  never  imagined  the  new  language 
of  Facebook — a  development  Jhe  Atlantic's  Ben  Zimmer  describes  as  "the 
rise  of  the  Zuckerverb."  At  the  2011  f8  conference,  the  event  you'll  remem- 
ber when  Mark  Zuckerberg  introduced  the  doublethink  of  "frictionless 
sharing,"  he  also  launched  a  new  language  that  included  verbs.  "When  we 
started,  the  vocabulary  was  really  limited.  You  could  only  express  a  small 
number  of  things,  like  who  you  were  friends  with.  Then  last  year,  when  we 
introduced  the  Open  Graph,  we  added  nouns,  so  you  could  like  anything 
that  you  wanted.  This  year  we're  adding  verbs.  We're  going  to  make  it  so  you 
can  connect  to  anything  in  any  way  you  want,"  Zuckerberg  announced, 
without  any  self-evident  irony,  at  f8.^^ 

One  wonders  what  new  social  language  Zuckerberg  will  introduce  at  f8 
2012  to  improve  our  connectivity.  The  Zuckerconjunction,  perhaps. 

In  his  critique  of  Zuckerberg's  choice  of  words,  Jhe  Atlantic's  Ben  Zim- 
mer notes  that  "language  is  being  recast  in  a  more  profound  way,  turned  into 
a  utilitarian  tool  for  "expressing"  relationships  to  objects  in  the  world  in  a 
remarkably  unexpressive  fashion."^^  And  this  Orwellian  corruption  of 
language  is,  of  course,  a  reflection  of  a  deeper  and  more  troubling  political 
and  economic  malaise.  As  Jeremiah  Owyang,  a  social  media  analyst  at  the 
Altimeter  Group  notes  the  problem  with  the  Zuckerverb  and  with  utilitar- 
ian networks  like  Klout  and  Kred  is  that  they  "lack  sentimental  analysis."^° 
In  this  economy  friendship  is  transformed  from  a  private  pleasure  without 
monetary  value  into  a  profit  center.  Take,  for  example,  eEvent,  a  start-up  so- 
cial platform  that  financially  rewards  people  who  encourage  their  friends  to 
attend  an  event.^^  But  do  any  of  us  really  want  "friends"  who  profit  finan- 
cially if  we  attend  an  event,  buy  an  airline  ticket  or  eat  at  a  restaurant? 

As  the  twentieth-century  American  philosopher  John  Dewey  recognized, 
our  personalities  are  neither  as  rationally  self-interested,  quantifiable  or  fixed 
as  Zuckerberg  or  the  other  evangelists  of  social  media  believe.  Rather  than 


64  ANDREW  KEEN 

"something  complete,  perfect,  finished,  an  organized  whole  of  parts  united 
by  the  impress  of  a  comprehensive  form,"  our  individual  identity,  Dewey  ar- 
gued, is  actually  "something  moving,  changing,  discrete,  and  above  all  initi- 
ating instead  of  final."^^  And  this  may  be  why  Dewey  believed  that  "of  all 
affairs,  communication  is  the  most  wonderful."^^ 

And  this  also  explains  why,  as  Wall  Street  Journal  columnist  and  former 
Reagan  speechwriter  Peggy  Noonan  reminds  us,  America  is  a  place  of  "sec- 
ond chances"  in  which  the  essence  of  our  liberty  is  rooted  in  our  right  to  shed 
a  previous  identity  and  reinvent  ourselves  as  different  individuals.  "Gam- 
blers, bounders,  ne'er-do-wells,  third  sons  in  primogeniture  cultures — most 
of  us  came  here  to  escape  something!"  Noonan  says  about  the  cultural  com- 
plexity of  the  American  experience.  "Our  people  came  here  not  only  for  a 
new  chance  but  to  disappear,  hide  out,  tend  their  wounds,  and  summon  the 
energy,  in  turn,  to  impress  the  dopes  back  home."^*^ 

Indeed,  if  we  are  to  believe  Aaron  Sorkin's  screenplay  of  The  Social  Net- 
work, even  Mark  Zuckerberg  himself  is  an  example  of  a  young  American 
who  went  west — fleeing  from  Cambridge,  Massachusetts  to  Palo  Alto, 
California — to  escape  a  broken  relationship  with  his  original  Facebook  co- 
founder  and  begin  all  over  again.  Yet,  for  Zuckerberg,  it  seems,  there  is 
nothing  problematic  about  the  unforgiving  nature  of  individual  transpar- 
ency and  network  openness. 

"To  get  people  to  this  point  where  there's  more  openness — that's  a  big 
challenge,"  Zuckerberg  thus  confessed  with  the  straight-faced  understatement 
of  a  spokesman  from  the  Ministry  of  Truth  about  his  grand  historical  project 
to  reengineer  the  human  condition.  "But  I  think  we'll  do  it.  I  just  think  it  will 
take  time.  The  concept  that  the  world  will  be  better  if  you  share  more  is  some- 
thing that's  pretty  foreign  to  a  lot  of  people  and  it  runs  into  all  these  privacy 
concerns."^^ 

Privacy  concc-ns,  eh,  Mark?  Yes,  I  have  one  or  two. 


3 


VISIBILITY  IS  A  TRAP 

Brock  Anton:  Maced  in  the  face,  hit  with  a  Button,  tear  gassed  twice,  6  broken  fingers, 
blood  everywhere,  punched  afucken  pig  in  head  with  riot  gear  on  knocked  him  to  the 
ground,  through  the  jersey  on  a  burning  cop  car  flipped  some  cars,  burnt  some  smart 
cars,  burnt  some  cop  cars,  I'm  on  the  news ....  One  word .  . .  History  ©©© 

Ashley  Pehota:  brockkkk!  Take  this  down!!!  Its  evidence!^ 

Privacy  Concerns 

Let's  start  with  three  of  my  deepest  concerns  about  individual  privacy  and 
autonomy  in  the  age  of  networked  intelligence.  Firstly,  what  exactly  will  be 
the  fate  of  privacy  when  you  and  I  and  everyone  else  are  trapped,  for  better 
or  worse,  in  a  radically  transparent  network  of  "frictionless  sharing"  that 
has  done  away  with  secrecy  and  solitariness?  Secondly,  what  happens  in  just 
eight  years'  time,  in  2020,  when  everything — from  our  intelligent  cars  to  our 
intelligent  televisions  to  our  intelligent  telephones  to  our  other  50  billion 
networked  devices — are  connected?  And  thirdly,  what  are  the  human  im- 
plications of  this  great  rewiring,  this  cult  of  the  social  which,  according 
to  Don  Tapscott  and  Doug  Williams,  represents  a  grand  historical  turning 
point  equal  to  the  Renaissance  in  the  history  of  mankind? 

We've  already  described  Mark  Zuckerberg's  first  five-year  plan  of  trans- 
forming the  world  into  a  social  experience.  But  there's  a  second  five-year  plan, 
too,  and  it's  even  more  chilling  than  the  first.  In  ten  years'  time,  according  to 
Zuckerberg,  "a  thousand  times  more  information  about  each  individual  will 
flow  through  Facebook."  That's  Zuckerberg's  Law.  And  what  it  means,  he 


66  ANDREW  KEEN 

predicts,  is  that  "people  are  going  to  have  a  device  with  them  at  all  times  that's 
[automatically]  sharing"  this  cornucopia  of  personal  information.^ 

What  it  means  is  that  everyone — via  transparent  online  networks  like 
SocialEyes,  Hotlist,  Facebook's  Open  Graph  and  Timeline,  SocialCam, 
Waze,  Tripit,  Plancast  and  Into. now — will  know  everything  we  are  doing, 
watching,  reading,  buying,  eating  and,  most  ominously,  thinking.  What  it 
means  is  that,  in  ten  years'  time,  we'll  have  eliminated  loneliness  and  the 
only  place  you'll  be  able  to  find  privacy  is  in  museums,  where  its  corpse  will, 
no  doubt,  be  hung  next  to  pictures  of  the  human  condition  by  old  masters 
like  Johannes  Vermeer  and  Rembrandt  Van  Rijn. 

But,  like  Jeremy  Bentham,  Mark  Zuckerberg  is  wrong — radically  wrong 
that  this  shared  future  makes  us  more  human,  wrong  that  this  "automatic 
sharing"  of  information  necessarily  makes  the  world  a  better  place,  wrong 
that  Zuckerberg's  Law  benefits  either  society  or  the  self  Rather  than  a  virtu- 
ous cycle,  this  social  media  revolution  may  well  represent  a  descent — perhaps 
even  a  dizzying  fall — into  a  vicious  cycle  of  less  and  less  individual  freedom, 
weaker  and  weaker  communal  ties,  and  more  and  more  unhappiness. 

Rather  than  the  next  Renaissance,  the  age  of  networked  intelligence 
could  well  represent  a  new  Dark  Ages,  a  nonfictional  remix  of  the  feudal 
world  of  John  Balliol,  with  its  radical  economic  and  cultural  inequalities,  its 
myriad  of  fragmented  worlds  and  its  hierarchical  networks  of  interna- 
tional elites.  Instead  of  making  us  happier  and  more  connected,  social 
media's  siren  song — the  incessant  calls  to  digitally  connect,  the  cultural 
obsession  with  transparency  and  openness,  the  never-ending  demand  to 
share  everything  about  ourselves  with  everyone  else — is,  in  fact,  both  a  sig- 
nificant cause  and  effect  of  the  increasingly  vertiginous  nature  of  twenty- 
first-century  life. 

The  inconvenient  truth  is  that  social  media,  for  all  its  communitarian 
promises,  is  dividing  rather  than  bringing  us  together,  creating  what  Walter 
Kirn  describes  as  a  "fragmentarian  society."^  In  our  digital  age,  we  are,  iron- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  67 

ically,  becoming  more  divided  than  united,  more  unequal  than  equal,  more 
anxious  than  happy,  lonelier  rather  than  more  socially  connected.  A  No- 
vember 2009  Pew  Research  report  about  "Social  Isolation  and  New  Technol- 
ogy,"^ for  example,  found  that  members  of  networks  like  Facebook,  Twitter, 
MySpace  and  Linkedin  are  26  percent  less  likely  to  spend  time  with  their 
neighbors  (thus,  ironically,  creating  the  need  for  social  networks  like 
Nextdoor.com  and  Yatown  that  connect  local  communities).  A  2007  Brigham 
Young  University  research  study,  which  analysed  184  social  media  users, 
concluded  that  the  heaviest  networkers  "feel  less  socially  involved  with  the 
community  around  them."^  While  a  meta-analysis  of  seventy-two  separate 
studies  conducted  between  1979  and  2009  by  the  University  of  Michigan's 
Institute  for  Social  Research  showed  that  contemporary  American  college 
students  are  40  percent  less  empathetic  than  their  counterparts  in  the  1980s 
and  1990s. ^  Even  our  tweets  are  becoming  sadder,  with  a  study  made  by 
scientists  from  the  University  of  Vermont  of  63  million  Twitter  users  be- 
tween 2009  and  201 1  proving  that  "happiness  is  going  downhill."^ 

Most  troubling  of  all,  a  fifteen-year  study  of  300  social  media  subjects  by 
Professor  Sherry  Turkic,^  the  director  of  MIT's  Initiative  on  Technology 
and  the  Self,  showed  that  perpetual  networking  activity  is  actually  under- 
mining many  parents'  relationship  with  their  children.^  "Technology  pro- 
poses itself  as  the  architect  of  our  intimacies,"  Turkic  says  about  the  digital 
architecture  in  which  we  are  now  all  living.  But  the  truth,  her  decade  and  a 
half  of  research  reveals,  is  quite  the  reverse.  Technology,  she  finds,  has  be- 
come our  "phantom  limb,"^^  particularly  for  young  people  who,  Turkic  finds, 
are  sending  up  to  6,000  social  media  announcements  a  day  and  who  have 
never  either  written  nor  received  a  handwritten  letter.  No  wonder,  then,  that 
teens  have  not  only  stopped  using  email,  but  also  no  longer  use  the 
telephone — both  are  too  intimate,  too  private  for  a  digital  generation  that 
uses  texting  as  a  "protection"  for  their  "feelings."^^ 

Turkle's  conclusion  on  what  she  calls  today's  always  online  "post-familial 


68  ANDREW  KEEN 

family"  is  disturbing,  particularly  when  imagined  in  terms  of  the  Internet 
as  architecture  comprising  many  small  theaters  in  which  we  are  entirely 
alone.  "Their  members  are  alone-together  each  in  their  own  rooms,  each  on 
a  networked  computer  or  mobile  device,"  she  concludes  her  depressing  study 
of  our  Internet  habits.  "We  go  online  because  we  are  busy  but  end  up  spend- 
ing more  time  with  technology  and  less  with  each  other."^^  Perhaps  it's  not 
surprising,  therefore,  that,  according  to  one  American  law  firm,  20  percent  of 
new  divorce  cases  reference  inappropriate  sexual  conversations  on  Face- 
book  as  a  factor  in  the  marriage  breakup.  ^^  Here,  Turkle's  notion  of  tech- 
nology proposing  itself  as  "the  architect  of  our  intimacies"  is  sadly  prescient. 
The  problem  with  flirting  on  Facebook  is  that  Mark  Zuckerberg's  creation 
has  been  architected  as  a  public  dorm  room  rather  than  as  a  private  bed- 
room. That's  why  so  many  extra-marital  Facebook  intimacies  are  ending  up 
in  the  divorce  court. 

It's  not  just  veteran  academics  like  Sherry  Turkle  who  worry  about  the 
solitariness  of  hypervisible  life  in  the  social  media  age.  Jean  Meyer,  the 
twenty-eight-year-old  founder  of  DateMySchool.com,  an  Internet  match- 
making service  for  college  students  that  prioritizes  privacy  over  social  trans- 
parency, concurs  with  Turkle  about  the  failure  of  the  wired  generation  to 
establish  emotion  connections  with  each  other.  "People  in  the  21st  century 
are  alone,"  Meyer  told  The  New  York  Times  in  February  2011.  "We  have  so 
many  new  ways  of  communicating,  yet  we  are  so  alone."^^ 

Not  only  is  networking  technology  dividing  us  from  others,  but  it  is  also 
splintering  the  self  "You  have  one  identity,"  Mark  Zuckerberg  infamously 
said.  But  just  as  social  is  remaking  every  industry,  so  it  is  also  splintering 
traditional  notions  of  individual  personality  and  thus  breaching  Zucker- 
berg's childish  and  self-serving  notion  of  identity.  In  describing  what  she 
calls  the  "practice  of  the  protean  self,"'^  MIT's  Turkle  argues  that  "we  have 
moved  from  multitasking  to  multi-lifing."^^  But  while  we  are  forever  culti- 
vating our  collaborative  self,  she  argues,  what  is  being  lost  is  our  experience 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  69 

of  being  alone  and  privately  reflecting  on  our  emotions.  The  end  result,  Turkle 
explains,  is  a  perpetual  juvenile,  somebody  she  calls  a  "tethered  child,"^^  the 
type  of  person  who,  like  one  of  Turkle's  subjects  in  her  study,  believes  that 
"if  Facebookwere  deleted,  I'd  be  deleted  too."^^ 

Dalton  Conley,  New  York  University's  professor  of  Social  Sciences, 
offers  a  similar  critique  to  Turkle  of  today's  networked  protean  self  He 
describes  the  people  of  our  digital  age  as  "intraviduals" — fragmented  souls 
always  caught  between  identities,  possessing  "multiple  selves  competing  for 
attention  within  his/her  own  mind,  just  as  externally,  she  or  he  is  bom- 
barded by  multiple  stimuli  simultaneously."^^  Rather  than  the  coherent  and 
centered  individual  identity  of  analog  man,  therefore,  the  intradividual's 
plastic  "self"  reflects  the  perpetual  flux  of  social  media's  myriad  streams  of 
information.  As  Guy  Debord,  a  twentieth-century  critic  of  electronic  soci- 
ety, noted  in  his  Situationalist  manifesto  Society  of  the  Spectacle,  the  "society 
which  eliminates  geographical  distance  reproduces  distance  internally  as 
spectacular  separation."^^ 

Turkle  and  Conley's  sociological  observations  about  the  perpetually  di- 
vided and  ungrounded  self  are  also  supported  by  scientists  like  Oxford  Uni- 
versity neuroscientist  Baroness  Susan  Greenfield.  Greenfield — who  debated 
Second  Life  founder  Philip  Rosedale  at  the  "Silicon  Valley  Comes  to  Ox- 
ford" event  about  the  reality  of  virtual  reality — claims  that  social  media 
networks  like  Facebook  and  the  140-character  Twitter  shorten  our  atten- 
tion spans  and  fragment  our  brains  with  their  incessant  updates  and  con- 
tinual need  to  reiterate  our  online  existence. 

"We  know  how  small  babies  need  constant  reassurance  that  they  exist," 
Professor  Greenfield  explains,  perhaps  also  offering  a  scientific  explanation 
for  the  thinking  of  Jeremy  Bentham,  that  "boy  to  the  last,"  behind  his  Auto- 
Icon.  "My  fear  is  that  these  technologies  are  infantilizing  the  brain  into  the 
state  of  small  children  who  are  attracted  by  buzzing  noises  and  bright  lights, 
who  have  a  small  attention  span  and  who  live  for  the  moment."^^ 


70  ANDREW  KEEN 

The  Digital  Aristocrazia 

No,  social  media  isn't  very  social.  "The  ties  that  we  form  through  the  Inter- 
net are  not,  in  the  end,  the  ties  that  bind,"  Sherry  Turkic  reminds  us.  And 
as  best-selling  author  Malcolm  Gladwell  argues  in  a  New  Yorker  critique  of 
Clay  Shirky's  communitarian  politics,  "the  platforms  of  social  media  are 
built  around  weak  ties,"^^  thus  turning  us  into  perpetual  joiners  rather  than 
the  active  participants  that  political  theorists  like  Alexis  de  Tocqueville  saw 
as  the  essential  ingredients  of  a  successful  democracy.  So  social  media  net- 
works connect  people  that  mostly  haven't  and  will  never  meet,  thereby 
transforming  these  "communities"  into  libertarian  aggregations  of  autono- 
mous intraviduals  in  constant  motion  who  reinvent  their  identities  at  will, 
and  who  join,  unjoin  then  rejoin  these  groups  with  the  click  of  a  mouse. 

We  caught  a  glimpse  of  this  dystopian  future  during  the  English  riots  of 
August  2011,  where  the  Utopian  ideal  of  "networked  intelligence"  was  trans- 
formed into  a  distributed,  viral  version  of  ^  Clockwork  Orange.  Utilizing 
Twitter,  Facebook  and  the  private  BBM  messaging  system  on  RIM's  Black- 
Berry  network,  individual  rioters  were  able  to  use  "social"  media  to  keep  one 
step  ahead  of  the  police,  forming  and  reforming  in  real-time  as  they  systemati- 
cally destroyed  neighborhoods  and  looted  stores.  Arguing  that  the  use  of  so- 
cial media  in  the  riots  was  a  "mirror"  to  society,  Google  chairman  Eric  Schmidt 
insists  that  we  shouldn't  "blame  the  internet"  for  this  civic  disorder. ^^  In  one 
sense,  Schmidt  is  right  and,  like  him,  I  strongly  disagree  with  calls  by  English 
politicians  for  either  Twitter  and  Facebook  "blackouts"^"^  during  emergencies 
or  for  the  "banning"^^  of  suspected  rioters  from  social  media.  But  Schmidt 
misses  the  real  meaning  of  the  riots.  Rather  than  a  one-way  mirror,  the  Inter- 
net is,  as  the  fictional  Sean  Parker  said,  where  we  now  live.  So  when  we  look  at 
the  Internet,  we  are  gazing  at  something  that  reflects  not  only  ourselves  but 
also  the  dominant  values  of  society.  The  highly  individualized  2011  riots  are, 
in  many  ways,  therefore  indistinguishable  from  social  media — they  are  the 
mirror  of  a  networked  world  in  which  we  are  living  alone  together.  This  is  a 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO 


world  inhabited  by  Conley's  "intradividuals"  who  collectively  make  up  Walter 
Kirn's  "fragmentarian  society."  It's  a  world  that  Joshua  Cooper  Ramo,  a  for- 
mer editor  at  Time,  dubs  our  "Age  of  the  Unthinkable" — an  epoch  character- 
ized by  endless  viral  disorder  and  real-time  social  pandemics. ^'^ 

The  BlackBerry  fuelled,  nihilistic  riots  of  201 1  are,  however,  only  one  reflec- 
tion of  our  social  media  age.  The  other,  politically  more  positive  side  are  today's 
popular  demonstrations  against  economic  injustice  such  as  Occupy  Wall  Street 
(OWS)  driven,  in  part,  by  networks  like  Facebook  and  Twitter.  As  a  mirror  of 
the  Internet,  OWS  is  a  loosely  organized,  hyper-democratic  movement  which 
encourages  everyone  to  tell  their  own  unique  stories  on  networks  like  the  pro- 
tean WeArethe99Percent  Tumblr  blog.  Thus,  the  10,000  to  15,000  tweets  an 
hour,  the  900  OWS  events  set  up  on  Meetup.com  and  the  thousands  of  Face- 
book  groups  dedicated  to  the  national  protests^"^  are  all  a  reflection  of  our 
fragmentarian  society  in  which  we,  as  intraviduals  with  multiple  selves,  are 
using  social  media  as  our  personalized  and  often  narcissistic  broadcast  plat- 
forms. And  so,  as  the  politically  progressive  Guardian  columnist  Simon 
Jenkins  notes,  "with  no  leaders,  no  policies,  no  programme  beyond  opposi- 
tion to  status  quo,"  the  OWS  protests  are,  like  Facebook  or  Twitter  them- 
selves, just  background  noise,  a  never-ending  conversation,  "mere  scenery."^^ 

Of  course,  not  all  political  protest  organized  via  social  media  is  purely 
scenic.  I  happened  to  be  in  Moscow  in  December  2011,  on  the  weekend  of 
the  election  that  triggered  the  very  real  protests  against  Vladimir  Putin's 
regime  and,  as  I  acknowledged  in  a  CNN  dispatch,^^  there  is  no  doubt  that 
Russian  social  media  networks  like  Livejournal  and  Vkontakte,  as  well  as 
Twitter  and  Facebook,  were  critical  in  organizing  these  popular  demonstra- 
tions. Indeed,  from  Moscow's  Lubyanka  Square  to  Wall  Street's  Zuccotti 
Park  to  Cairo's  Tahrir  Square,  2011  was  the  year  that  social  media  became 
an  important  organizational  tool  in  challenging  economic  and  political 
injustice.  Time  magazine  even  made  "The  Protestor"  its  2011  Person  of  the 
Year  and,  as  Kurt  Andersen,  who  wrote  Time's  cover  story  for  this  issue, ^° 


72  ANDREW  KEEN 

told  me  on  my  TechcrunchTV  show,  the  initial  Arab  Spring  rebellions 
could  never  have  happened  without  social  media.^^ 

But  even  in  the  contemporary  Middle  East,  it  still  remains  unclear  how 
central  a  role  social  media  will  play  in  the  formation  of  democratic  govern- 
ments. Judging  by  the  speed  with  which  the  political  optimism  of  the  Arab 
Spring  has  evaporated,  the  auguries  for  Twitter  or  Facebook  helping  build 
the  architecture  of  democracy  in  Egypt,  Palestine  or  Tunisia  are  not  partic- 
ularly encouraging.  The  problem  is  that  political  democracy  is  more  than 
just  the  so-called  "people  power"  of  fanciful  Facebook  users  committed  to 
the  same  vague  political  cause.  For  example,  one  member  of  the  Palestinian 
social  media  "March  15  movement"  described  it  as  a  leaderless  association  of 
"bubbles"  that  has  yet  to  congeal.^^  While  another  Palestinian  activist, 
sounding  like  an  OWS  protestor  dreamily  described  the  goal  of  the  move- 
ment as  to  "liberate  the  minds  of  our  people."  But,  for  democracy  to  congeal 
in  organizations  like  March  15,  for  201 1  to  avoid  becoming  a  repeat  of  1848, 
another  year  of  failed  revolutions  against  authoritarian  states,  leaders  have  to 
emerge  and  translate  social  media's  undoubted  potential  into  properly  fi- 
nanced, structured  movements  with  accountable  leadership  and  a  viable  politi- 
cal agenda  that  goes  beyond  the  vague  promise  of  liberating  people's  minds. 

Besides,  in  spite  of  Kurt  Anderson's  faith  in  The  Protestor,  it's  not  really 
clear  how  central  the  role  of  social  networks  have  been  in  the  overthrow  of 
repressive  regimes  in  the  Middle  East — especially  since  even  in  the  rela- 
tively advanced  Egypt  only  5  percent  of  the  citizens  use  Facebook  and  1 
percent  are  on  Twitter.^^  "We've  had  a  lot  of  revolutions  before  Twitter," 
George  Friedman,  the  geo-strategic  futurist  and  best-selling  author  of  ZOll's 
The  Next  Decade:  Where  We've  Been  . . .  And  Where  We're  Going,^^  reminded 
me  when  he  appeared  on  my  TechcrunchTV  show  in  April  201 1.  In  the  Egypt 
of  early  2011,  Friedman  explained,  the  vast  majority  of  Egyptian  citizens 
viewed  what  he  regards  as  the  staged  uprising  against  the  Mubarak  regime  with 
suspicion.  The  "ignorance"  of  the  Western  media  is  "breathtaking,"  Friedman 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  73 

told  me,  when  it  comes  to  exaggerating  the  role  of  social  media  in  contempo- 
rary political  upheaval.  And  that's  because,  he  explained,  extensive  use  of 
social  media  in  authoritarian  societies  seems  to  confirm  western  liberal  val- 
ues. "If  they  tweet,"  Friedman  dryly  commented  on  the  western  media's 
self-centered  obsession  with  Twitter  or  Facebook,  "they  must  be  like  us." 

And  sometimes,  I'm  afraid,  if  f hey  tweet,  they  actually  are  us.  Take,  for 
example,  the  case  of  the  imprisoned  Syrian  lesbian  blogger,  Amina  Araf,  dur- 
ing the  2011  revolution  against  the  Baathite  regime  in  Syria.  Fourteen  thou- 
sand Facebook  users  loaned  their  names  to  a  campaign  to  release  Araf  from 
jail.  The  only  problem  was  that  Araf  turned  out  to  be  a  fake.  "She"  was  really 
Tom  MacMaster,  a  failed  American  writer  living  in  Scotland  with  as  much 
experience  of  life  inside  a  Syrian  jail  as  you  or  I.^^ 

So  what  is  the  real  value  of  social  media  in  repressive  regimes?  "Twitter  is  a 
wonderful  tool  for  secret  policeman  to  find  revolutionaries,"  Friedman  told 
me.  His  analysis  reflects  the  so-called  "Morozov  Principle"^^  of  Stanford 
University  scholar  Evgeny  Morozov,  whose  2010  book.  The  Net  Delusion: 
The  Dark  Side  of  Internet  Freedonr'^  argues  that  social  media  tools  are  being 
used  by  secret  policemen  in  undemocratic  states  like  Iran,  Syria,  and  China 
to  spy  on  dissidents.  As  Morozov  told  me  when  he  appeared  on  my  Tech- 
crunchTV  show  in  January  2011,^^  these  authoritarian  governments  are 
using  the  Internet  in  classic  Benthamite  fashion — relying  on  social  networks 
to  monitor  the  behavior,  activities  and  thoughts  of  their  own  citizens.  In 
China,  Thailand,  and  Iran,  therefore,  the  use  of  Facebook  can  literally  be  a 
facecrime  and  the  Internet's  architecture  has  become  a  vast  Inspection- 
House,  a  wonderful  tool  for  secret  policemen  who  no  longer  even  need  to  leave 
their  desks  to  persecute  their  own  people.  In  November  2011,  for  example,  the 
Thai  government  warned  Facebook  users  who  "liked"  antimonarchy  groups 
that  they  would  be  liable  for  prosecution.^^  A  month  later,  the  Chinese  gov- 
ernment announced  tough  new  laws  that  required  people  to  register  with  their 
real  names  on  indigenous  social  networks  like  Sina  and  Tencent.'*^  Then  in 


74  ANDREW  KEEN 

January  2012,  Iran  imposed  equally  "draconian"  restrictions  on  the  country's 
cybercafes  designed  to  spy  on  Iranian  social  media  users."^^ 

Visibility  can  often  be  the  bloodiest,  most  tragic  kind  of  trap.  The  Moro- 
zov  Principle  extends  to  criminal  gangs  who  are  intimidating  and  even  exe- 
cuting social  media  users  as  a  warning  against  online  whistle-blowing.  In 
Mexico,  for  example,  where  some  particularly  reactionary  local  politicians 
want  to  make  the  use  of  Twitter  illegal,'*^  g^i^gs  have  taken  revenge  on  citi- 
zens who  use  social  media  to  denounce  drug  cartel  activity.  "A  woman  was 
hogtied  and  disemboweled,  her  intestines  protruding  from  three  deep  cuts 
on  her  abdomen.  Attackers  left  her  topless,  dangling  by  her  feet  and  hands 
from  a  bridge  in  the  border  city  of  Nuevo  Laredo.  A  bloodied  man  next  to 
her  was  hanging  by  his  hands,  his  right  shoulder  severed  so  deeply  the  bone 
was  visible,"  reports  CNN  on  the  killings  in  Mexico.  "This  is  going  to  hap- 
pen to  all  of  those  posting  funny  things  on  the  Internet,"  a  sign,  left  near  the 
bodies,  said.  "You  better  (expletive)  pay  attention.  I'm  about  to  get  you."'^^ 

The  Nev\f  Numerati 

Not  only  is  social  media  being  used  by  repressive  regimes  or  oganizations  to 
strengthen  their  hold  on  power,  but  it  is  also  compounding  the  ever-widening 
inequalities  between  the  influencers  and  the  new  digital  masses.  If  identity  is 
the  new  currency  and  reputation  the  new  wealth  of  the  social  media  age,  then 
today's  hypervisible  digital  elite  is  becoming  a  tinier  and  tinier  proportion  of  the 
population.  Reid  Hoffman  believes  that  the  Internet's  empowerment  of  the  in- 
dividual increases  what  he  calls  "the  liquidity  of  the  individual."^"^  But  for  all  the 
egalitarian  rhetoric  of  super-nodes  like  Robert  Scoble  (@scobleizer)  with  over 
200,000  Twitter  followers  and  Jeff  Jarvis  (@JefFjarvis)  with  nearly  100,000, 
some  people — liquid  people  like  Scoble  and  Jarvis — are,  to  borrow  another  of 
Orwell's  chilling  phrases,  much  "more  equal  than  others"'^^  on  today's  net- 
work. On  Twitter,  for  example,  only  0.05  percent  of  people  have  more  than 
10,000  followers  with  22.5  percent  of  users  accounting  for  90  percent  of  activ- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  75 

ity,'*^  thus  reflecting  the  increasingly  unequal  power  structure  of  an  attention 
economy  in  which  the  most  valuable  currency  is  being  heard  above  the  noise. 

"Monopolies  are  actually  even  more  likely  in  highly  networked  markets  like 
the  online  world,"  wrote  /^r^/^  editor-in-chief  Chris  Anderson.  "The  dark  side 
of  network  effects  is  that  rich  nodes  get  richer."'^''  This  dark  side  is  compounded 
by  reputation  networks  like  Klout,  Kred  and  Peer  Index,  which  may  be  cre- 
ating what  one  analyst  calls  a  "social  media  caste  system"  in  which  super- 
nodes  receive  preferential  treatment  over  those  with  low  reputation  scores."^^ 

The  inequalities  between  rich  and  poor  nodes  is  even  more  exaggerated 
in  the  wake  of  2009's  Great  Recession.  "The  people  who  use  these  [social 
media]  tools  are  the  ones  with  higher  education,  not  the  tens  of  millions 
whose  position  in  today's  world  has  eroded  so  sharply,"  notes  Time  maga- 
zine business  columnist  Zachary  Karabell.^^  Social  media  contribute  to  eco- 
nomic bifurcation The  irony  is  that  social  media  widen  the  social  divide, 

making  it  even  harder  for  the  have-nots  to  navigate.  They  allow  those  with 
jobs  to  do  them  more  effectively  and  companies  that  are  profiting  to  profit 
more.  But  so  far,  they  have  done  little  to  aid  those  who  are  being  left  behind. 
They  are,  in  short,  business  as  usual." 

Karabell's  observations  are  accurate.  But  this  "business  as  usual"  reflects 
a  deeper  historical  truth  about  the  unpalatable  reality  of  political  and  eco- 
nomic power.  "Except  during  short  intervals  of  time,  people  are  always  gov- 
erned by  an  elite.  1  use  the  word  elite  [Italian:  aristocrazia]  in  its  etymological 
sense,  meaning  the  strongest,  the  most  energetic,  and  most  capable — for  good 
as  well  as  evil,"  wrote  the  early  twentieth-century  Italian  sociologist  Vil- 
fredo  Pareto  in  The  Rise  and  Fall  ofElites^^  This  argument,  which  later  be- 
came known  as  Pareto's  "80-20  principle"  or  "the  law  of  the  vital  few"  is  as 
true  today,  in  the  digital  age,  as  it  was  during  the  industrial  revolution  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  when  a  new  elite  of  factory  owners,  replaced  the  old 
landowning  aristocracy  and  vindicated  their  new  wealth  and  power  in  the 
language  of  the  free  market  and  of  democracy. 


76  ANDREW  KEEN 

Today,  the  emerging  elite  of  the  twenty-first  century,  for  good  as  well  as 
evil,  are  the  multibiUionaire  bankers  of  networked  personal  information, 
digital  plutocrats  like  the  Oxford  and  Stanford  educated  philosopher  Reid 
Hoffman  and  the  Harvard  computer  scientist  Mark  Zuckerberg,  whose 
companies  are  amassing  vast  amounts  of  other  people's  personal  information. 
They,  these  owners  of  the  private  networks,  are  the  new  ^ohdX  aristocrazia  of 
our  social  media  age,  the  twenty-first  century's  ruling  numerati,^^  and  it  is  in 
the  gulf  between  them  as  the  owners  and  we  as  the  producers  of  personal 
information  where  the  greatest  inequality  of  our  knowledge  economy  lies. 

Hypervisibility  Is  a  Hypertrap 

Michel  Foucault  was  correct.  Visibility  is,  indeed,  a  trap.  Franz  Kafka  could 
have  invented  today's  great  digital  exhibitionism,  with  its  cult  of  the  social 
and  its  bizarre  fetish  with  sharing.  Just  as  Joseph  K  unwittingly  ^/^/^r^^  all  his 
known  and  unknown  information  with  the  authorities  in  The  Trial,  so  we 
are  now  all  sharing  our  most  intimate  spiritual,  economic  and  medical  in- 
formation with  all  the  myriad  of  "free"  social  media  services,  products  and 
platforms  on  the  network  like  @quixotic's  Linkedln.  And,  given  that  the 
dominant  and  perhaps  only  business  model  of  all  this  social  media  economy 
is  adverting  sales,  it  is  inevitable  that  all  this  shared  personal  information 
will  end  up,  one  Kafkaesque  way  or  another,  in  the  hands  of  our  corporate 
advertising  "friends"  like  Facebook  and  Twitter. 

As  Meglena  Kuneva,  the  European  Consumer  comissioner,  said  in  March 
2009,  "personal  data  is  the  new  oil  of  the  Internet  and  the  new  currency  of 
the  digital  world."^^  Yes,  it's  the  fuel,  but  everything  else  too.  "Information 
is  what  our  world  runs  on,"  adds  the  historian  of  information,  James  Gleick, 
"the  blood  and  the  fuel,  the  vital  principle."^^ 

Yes,  social  information  is  becoming  the  vital  principle  of  the  global  knowl- 
edge economy.  And  it  is  this  contemporary  revolution  in  the  generation  of 
personal  data  that  explains  the  vertiginous  valuations  of  today's  social  media 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  77 

companies.  If  the  twentieth-century's  industrial  economy  was  shaped  by  bloody 
wars  over  oil,  today's  digital  economy  is  increasingly  characterized  by  conflict 
over  its  vital  principle — personal  information.  From  all  the  outrage  over  Face- 
book's  Open  Graph  initiative  to  Google's  exploitation  of  its  voyeuristic  Street- 
view  technology,  rarely  a  week  goes  by  without  another  story  of  a  sensational 
leak  of  our  information  by  one  of  the  Internet's  private  information  superpow- 
ers. In  today's  advertising  driven  social  media  economy,  you  see,  it's  data  about 
us  that  has  the  most  financial  value.  As  one  technology  CEO  told  the  Wall 
Street  Journaly  "advertisers  want  to  buy  access  to  people,  not  web  pages."^"* 
Which  explains  why,  as  the  newspaper  confirms,  "one  of  the  fastest-growing 
businesses  on  the  Internet  is  the  business  of  spying  on  Internet  users."^^ 

If  visibility  is  a  trap,  then  hypervisibility  is  a  hypertrap. 

The  problem  is  that  our  ubiquitous  online  culture  of  "free"  means  that 
every  social  media  company — from  Facebook  to  Twitter  to  geolocation 
services  like  foursquare,  Fiitlist,  and  Plancast — relies  exclusively  on  adver- 
tising for  its  revenue.  And  it's  information  about  us — James  Gleick's  "vital 
principle"^^ — that  is  driving  this  advertising  economy.  As  MoveOn.org 
president  Eli  Pariser,  another  sceptic  concerned  about  the  real  "cost"  of  all 
these  free  services,  argues  in  his  2011  book  The  Filter  Bubble,  "the  race  to 
know  as  much  as  possible  about  you  has  become  the  central  battle  of  the  era 
for  Internet  giants  like  Google,  Facebook,  Apple  and  Microsofi:."^^ 

"It  is  fundamentally  impossible  for  a  digital  advertising  business  to  care 
deeply  about  privacy,  because  the  user  is  the  only  asset  it  has  to  sell.  Even  if 
the  founders  and  executives  want  to  care  about  privacy,  at  the  end  of  the  day, 
they  can't:  the  economic  incentives  going  the  other  direction  are  just  too 
powerful,"  Michael  Fertik,  the  Silicon  Valley-based  CEO  of  Reputation, 
com,  a  company  dedicated  to  protecting  our  online  privacy,  told  me.  Fertik's 
argument  is  reiterated  by  the  media  theorist  and  CNN  columnist  Douglas 
Rushkoff  who  explains  that  rather  than  being  Facebook's  customers,  "we 
are  the  product."^^ 


78  ANDREW  KEEN 

Sharon  Zukin,  a  sociology  professor  at  the  City  University  of  New  York, 
goes  even  further  than  Fertik  or  RushkofFin  her  critique  of  social  media's 
allure.  "Our  entire  bodies  and  histories  are  being  opened  up  and  colonized 
and  stored  by  the  very  people  who  want  to  sell  us  things,"  she  says.  "Online 
shopping  is  becoming  a  master  of  these  technologies  of  simultaneous  coer- 
cion and  seduction."^^ 

Yes,  we — you  and  I  and  the  other  800  million  people  on  the  "free" 
Facebook — are,  indeed,  the  product  that  is  being  simultaneously  coerced  and 
seduced.  We  are  the  personalized  data  that  Facebook  and  many  other  social 
companies  are  selling  to  their  advertisers.  And  the  problem  is  that  the  more 
these  Web  3.0  companies  track  us,  the  more  effective  and  thus  valuable  their 
advertisements.  Indeed,  research  by  Catherine  Tucker,  a  professor  at  the 
M.I.T  Sloan  School  of  Management  has  discovered  that  the  effectiveness  of 
online  marketing  drops  by  65%  when  the  tracking  of  online  users  is  regu- 
lated. Web  tracking,  Professor  Tucker  testified  to  Congress,  enables  compa- 
nies "to  deliver  online  advertising  in  an  extraordinarily  precise  fashion" — a 
precision  that  seems  to  consumers,  she  added,  to  be  "creepy."^^ 

The  economic  incentives  of  the  $26  billion  annual  online  advertising 
market  have  become  so  powerful  that  there  is  now  a  massive  Silicon  Valley 
investment  boom  in  those  tracking  companies  that  target  our  online  per- 
sonal data.  Between  2007  and  early  2011  venture  capitalists  have,  according 
to  Dow  Jones  VentureSource,  invested  $4.7  billion  into  356  creepy  online 
tracking  firms  such  as  eXelate,  Media6Degrees,  33Across  and  MediaMath. 
These  tracking  firm  are  all  "trying  to  find  better  slices  of  data  on  individu- 
als," one  venture  capitalist  explained  the  current  investment  boom  to  the 
Wall  Street  Journal.  "Advertisers  want  to  buy  individuals.  They  don't  want 
to  buy  Web  pages."^^ 

Orwell's  enemy  oiOivnlife,  Big  Brother,  has  arrived  on  all  of  our  screens. 
Today  he  goes  under  the  name  of  tracking  firms  like  eXelate,  Media6Degrees, 
33Across  and  MediaMath.  Fie  wants  to  buy  us.  And  he  won't  let  us  alone. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  79 

This  chasm — between  ourselves,  RushkofFs  "product,"  and  the  advertisers 
who  want  to  know  everything  about  us,  between  the  producers  of  personal 
knowledge  and  those  that  seek  to  profit  from  this  information — is  well  cap- 
tured by  the  English  novelist  Zadie  Smith.  "To  ourselves,  we  are  special 
people,  documented  in  wonderful  photos,  and  it  also  happens  that  we  buy 

things To  the  advertisers,  we  are  our  capacity  to  buy,  attached  to  a  few 

personal,  relevant  photos,"  she  wrote  in  The  New.  York  Review  ofBooks.^^ 

Things  have  become  so  creepy  on  the  Internet  that  the  Wall  Street  Jour- 
nal dQ<iic2Xcd  a  five-part  series  of  2010  investigative  reports,  suitably  entitled 
"What  They  Know,"^^  to  the  Orwellian  business  of  spying  on  us.  But  nei- 
ther Kafka  nor  Orwell,  at  their  most  surreal,  could  have  dreamed  up  the 
story  of  the  real-time  mobile  app  that  is  always  watching  us.  Yet  that  "eter- 
nal child"  Jeremy  Bentham  dreamed  up  such  a  scenario  while  he  was  con- 
sulting with  the  Russian  enlightened  despot  Catherine  the  Great.  And  he 
called  it  the  Inspection-House. 

The  Wall  Street  Journal  reported  in  December  2010  that  "apps"  from 
popular  services  like  TextPlus,  Pandora  and  Grindr  on  our  iPhones  and  An- 
droid phones  are  passing  on  our  information  to  third-party  organizations. 
And  as  the  managing  director  of  the  Mobile  Marketing  Association  told  the 
Journal,  "in  the  world  of  mobile,  there  is  no  anonymity.  A  cell  phone  is  al- 
ways with  us.  It's  always  on."^"^  This  is  why  Apple — the  sponsor  of  that  origi- 
nal television  commercial  explaining  why  1984  won't  really  be  like  Nineteen 
Eighty-four — is  now  facing  a  class-action  lawsuit  which  alleges  that  "non- 
personal  information"  collected  by  Web  sites  like  Pandora  and  the  Weather 
Channel  is  being  used  to  identify  us  and  our  behavior  on  the  Internet. 

It's  not  just  apps  that  are  watching  us.  In  an  online  economy  driven  by 
"likes"  rather  than  "links,"  even  social  widgets  such  as  Facebook's  "Like," 
Google's  "-1-1"  and  Twitter's  "Tweet"  buttons  are  watching  us.  As  The  Wall 
Street  Journal  reported  in  May  2011,^^  these  "prolific"  widgets,  which  have 
been  added  to  20-25  percent  of  the  top  1,000  Web  sites,  enable  networks 


80  ANDREW  KEEN 

like  Facebook,  Google  and  Twitter  to  track  the  browsing  habits  of  users.  To 
be  followed  by  one  of  these  buttons,  all  a  user  needs  to  have  done  is  log  onto 
a  social  network  once  in  the  past  month.  Then,  irrespective  of  whether  or 
not  we  actually  click  on  any  buttons,  the  widgets  notify  Facebook,  Google 
and  Twitter  about  all  the  Web  sites  that  we  visit,  thereby  transforming  these 
social  networks  into  omniscient  inspection-houses  of  our  online  behavior. 

"We  are  seeing  a  race  to  the  privacy  bottom,"  Reputation.com's  Fertik  ex- 
plained to  me.  "The  older-school'  companies  that  don't  feel  comfortable  sell- 
ing as  much  detailed  information  about  you  are  being  forced  to  do  so  because 
the  young  turk'  companies  don't  feel  that  ethical  or  business  constraint  and 
are  therefore  commanding  higher  CPMs." 

Facebook  is  the  most  visible  and  aggressive  of  these  young  Turk  companies. 
As  The  Wall  Street  Journal's  ]uliz  Angwin  argues,  Facebook  is  making  friend- 
ing "obsolete"  by  enabling  us  to  know  as  much  about  the  intimate  business 
of  our  distant  acquaintances  as  we  do  about  our  closest  friends.  In  June  2011, 
the  company  even  introduced  a  "super  creepy"  face-tagging  system  that  au- 
tomatically scans  our  photos  and  identifies  our  friends. *^^  "Just  as  Facebook 
turned  friends  into  a  commodity,"  Angwin  explains,  "it  has  likewise  gathered 
our  personal  data — our  updates,  our  baby  photos,  our  endless  chirping  birth- 
day notes — and  readied  it  to  be  bundled  and  sold."^^ 

Facial  recognition  technology  is,  of  course,  really  creepy.  Researchers  at 
Carnegie  Mellon  University  have  even  discovered  that  this  technology  can 
now  be  used  to  accurately  predict  our  social  security  numbers. ^'^  Meanwhile, 
in  early  2011,  Jhe  New  York  Times  alerted  us  to  something  even  creepier 
than  either  snooping  apps  or  all-knowing  facial  recognition  technology: 
"Computers  That  See  You  and  Keep  Watch  Over  You."*"^  The  resemblance 
to  Bentham's  Inspection-House  is  uncanny — or,  as  a  social  media  metaphy- 
sician like  Steven  Johnson  might  say,  "serendipitous."''^  As  the  Times  reported, 
these  computers — which  contain  artificially  intelligent  sofiiware  designed  to 
recognize  facial  gestures  and  group  action — started  offin  prisons,  but  are  now 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  81 


also  being  used  in  hospitals,  shopping  malls,  schools  and  offices.  This  all  adds 
up,  of  course,  to  Benthams  simple  idea  of  architecture  with  which  we  are  al- 
ready very  familiar.  "At  work  or  school,  the  technology  opens  the  door  to  a 
computerized  supervisor  that  is  always  watching,"  The  New  York  Times  warns 
us  about  our  hypervisible  age.  "Are  you  paying  attention,  goofing  off  or  day- 
dreaming? In  stores  and  shopping  malls,  smart  surveillance  could  bring  be- 
havioral tracking  into  the  physical  world." '^^ 

That  computerized  supervisor  may  already  be  in  your  pocket,  making 
Wherel'm.at  the  default  setting  of  anyone  who  owns  an  Apple  or  Google 
smartphone.  That's  because  our  gadgets,  to  borrow  the  chilling  title  of  a  2011 
book  by  electronic  security  expert  Robert  Vamosi,  are  already  betraying  us.  Two 
data  scientists  have  discovered  that  all  our  Apple  iPhones  have  been  recording 
their  locations  and  then  saving  all  the  details  to  secret  files  on  the  "intelligent" 
device,  which  then  gets  copied  onto  our  computers  when  we  synchronize  it 
with  our  iPhone.  "Apple  has  made  it  possible  for  almost  anybody — a  jealous 
spouse,  a  private  detective — with  access  to  your  phone  or  computer  to  get 
detailed  information  about  where  you've  been,"  one  of  the  researchers  told 
the  appropriately  named  "Where  2.0"  conference  in  April  2011.''"^ 

That  intelligent  device  in  their  pocket  should  equally  worry  owners  of 
Google's  Android  smartphones.  In  late  April  2011,  The  Wall  Street  Journal 
reported  research  showing  that  Android  phones  "collected  its  location  every 
few  seconds  and  transmitted  the  data  to  Google  at  least  several  times  an 
hour."^^  Google  might,  as  Nicholas  Carr  argued,^"^  be  making  us  stupid,  but 
the  company  itself  is  anything  but  stupid.  As  Steve  Lee,  a  Google  product  man- 
ager, revealed  in  a  publicly  disclosed  2010  email,  location  data  is  "extremely 
valuable"  to  the  search  engine.  "I  cannot  stress  how  important  Google's 
Wi-Fi  location  database  is  to  our  Android  and  mobile-product  strategy,"  Lee 
added  in  this  email  to  Larry  Page,  Google's  co-founder  and  current  CEO.^^ 

But  it's  not  just  smartphone  owners  who  should  be  paranoid  about  their 
all-knowing  devices.  In  December  201 1,  Amazon — which  make  the  popular 


82  ANDREW  KEEN 

Kindle  tablet — were  granted  a  patent  that  not  only  uses  mobile  devices  to 
learn  where  we've  been  and  our  current  location,  but  also  is  able  to  determine 
where  we  will  go  next.  Like  Apple  and  Google,  of  course,  Amazon  wants  to 
own  us.  And  this  "Big  Brother  patent,  by  knowing  where  we've  been  and 
where  we  will  go,  promises  to  be  a  particularly  intrusive  algorithm  of  digital 
coercion  and  seduction." '^^  Indeed,  Amazon  is  racing  Apple  and  Google  for 
control  of  the  rapidly  growing  location-based  services  economy,  a  $2.9  billion 
market  (in  April  2011)  that  research  firm  Gartner  predicts  will  almost  triple 
to  $8.3  billion  by  2014.  Yes,  Reid  Hoffman's  Web  3.0  revolution,  that  ava- 
lanche of  "real  identities  generating  massive  amounts  of  data,"  is  now  a  reality 
and  it's  why  Amazon,  Google  and  Apple  are  now  scrambling  to  gather  loca- 
tion information  that  will  enable  them  to  build  huge  databases  that  can  auto- 
matically identify  our  exact  locations  via  our  smartphones. 

It  is  a  particularly  chilling  irony  that  the  all-knowing  devices  at  the  very 
heart  of  what  one  social  media  guru  describes  as  our  "trust  economy,"^''  are 
fundamentally  untrustworthy.  Indeed,  as  We  the  Media  author  Dan  Gillmor 
notes,  even  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  the  newspaper  which  has  done  such  a 
fine  job  exposing  the  crisis  of  online  privacy,  is  itself  connecting  "personally 
identifiable  information  with  Web  browsing  data  without  user  consent.^^ 
Yes,  our  gadgets,  and  even  some  of  our  newspapers,  are  betraying  us.^^  So 
who,  exactly,  can  we  trust  in  our  so-called  "trust  economy"? 

Nobody,  it  seems.  New  Scientist  magazine  reports  that  Chinese  and 
American  academics  have  developed  sofiiware  that,  whether  we  like  it  or 
not,  will  be  able  to  determine  our  location  to  a  few  hundred  meters  by  sim- 
ply looking  at  our  Internet  connection.  This  new  technology,  jointly  devel- 
oped by  computer  scientists  at  Northwestern  University  and  the  University 
of  Electronic  Science  and  Technology  of  China  in  Chengdu,  will  enable 
advertisers,  criminals,  security  agencies  and  even  friends  or  family  to  stalk 
anyone  who  happens  to  be  using  a  network  device. ^^ 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  83 

Big  Data 

"Big  Oil,  Big  Food,  Big  Pharma.  To  the  catalog  of  corporate  bigs  that  worry 
a  lot  of  us  little  people,  add  this:  Big  Data,"  wrote  The  New  York  Times' 
Natasha  Singer  at  the  end  of  April  20 11,  the  week  after  the  Apple  and  Google 
smartphone  allegations  went  public.^^ 

Are  you  worried  yet? 

Many  of  us  are — one  in  four  Americans,  to  be  exact.  A  January  2011  sur- 
vey revealed  that  more  Americans  worry  about  the  violation  of  their  online 
privacy  than  becoming  unemployed  or  having  to  declare  bankruptcy.  This 
research,  conducted  by  market  research  company  YouGov  and  published  on 
"Data  Privacy  Day,"  found  that  25  percent  of  Americans  are  fearful  of  being 
watched  online  and  having  their  privacy  breached,  more  than  either  the  23 
percent  who  worry  about  bankruptcy  or  the  22  percent  who  fear  losing  their 
job.^^  But,  rather  than  Big  Brother,  what  we  fear  most  of  all  is  Big  Data,  with 
a  June  2011  survey  from  the  University  of  Southern  California  showing  that 
nearly  half  of  American  adult  Internet  users  fear  snooping  companies  versus 
only  38  percent  worrying  about  snooping  government.^^ 

So  how  has  this  remixed  Dark  Age — with  its  0.05  percent  liquid  numerati 
of  super  nodes  like  @scobleizer  and  @quixotic,  its  underclass  of  anxious  and 
lonely  intradividuals,  and  its  ideological  orthodoxy  of  openness  and  transpar- 
ency that  makes  it  increasingly  impossible  for  anyone  to  be  let  alone — crept  up 
on  us?  What  are  the  intellectual,  technological  and  economic  origins  of  this 
twenty-first-century  networked  intelligence  era — a  time  when,  in  the  words 
of  MIT  professor  Sherry  Turkic,  we  are  all  alone  together'^  How  has  the  age 
of  the  great  exhibition  metastasized  into  our  age  of  great  exhibitionism? 

The  next  chapters  offer  a  vertiginous  history  of  social  media  that  con- 
nects Jeremy  Bentham's  industrial  Inspection-House  with  Mark  Zucker- 
berg's  Open  Graph.  And  to  begin  this  story,  let  me  show  you  another  picture 
that  you've  probably  seen  before — a  picture  so  creepy  that  it  has  not  one,  but 
three  corpses  lying  behind  it. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO 

"As  in  the  case  with  all  great  films,  truly  great  films,  no  matter  how  much  has  been  said  and 

written  about  them,  the  dialogue  about  it  will  always  continue.  Because  any  film  as  great  as 

Vertigo  demands  more  than  a  sense  of  admiration — //  demands  a  personal  response."^ 

—  MARTIN   SCORSESE. 


Three  Lies  and  Three  Corpses 

The  picture  is  entitled  San  Francisco  in  July  1849.  It's  a  landscape  of 
some  windswept  farmhouses  sheltering  beside  the  Bay  painted  in  the  roman- 
tic nineteenth-century  style  of  Albert  Bierstadt's  "Emerald  Wave."  There  is  a 
single  horse  with  two  riders  in  the  foreground  of  the  picture  and  a  clump  of 
barren  hills  looming  in  the  far  distance.  This  arrestingly  pastoral  nineteenth- 
century  scene  has  been  painted  with  a  northerly  perspective — the  artist 
imagining  San  Francisco  from  its  southern  peninsula,  from  the  perspective 
of  the  valley  between  the  Diablo  and  Santa  Cruz  mountain  ranges,  a  thirty- 
square-mile  area  known  for  most  of  the  twentieth  century  as  the  Santa  Clara 
Valley,  but  more  widely  known  today  as  Silicon  Valley. 

Now  fast-forward  a  hundred  years.  It's  the  middle  of  the  twentieth 
century  in  San  Francisco  and  the  little  windswept  village  beside  the  Bay  has 
grown  into  a  thriving  technological  and  industrial  metropolis,  a  manufac- 
turing center  for  the  shipbuilding,  defense  and  electronics  industries.  Two 
old  college  friends,  both  graduates  of  Stanford,  the  university  from  down 
on  the  peninsula  founded  by  the  nineteenth-century  railway  baron  Leland 
Stanford,  are  looking  at  this  picture.  One,  a  graying,  faintly  shabby  former 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  85 

San  Francisco  detective  named  John  "Scottie"  Ferguson,  is  standing  near 
the  painting,  while  the  other,  Gavin  Elster,  a  dapper  shipbuilding  magnate 
with  a  trim  moustache,  is  commenting  upon  it  from  behind  the  desk  in  his 
office. 

There  is  a  vivid  contrast  between  the  simple  painting  and  Elster  s  ornate 
San  Francisco  office.  The  middle-aged  industrialist — who  runs  the  shipyard 
on  behalf  of  his  young  wife's  family — is  seated  behind  a  grand  mahogany  desk 
in  a  sumptuously  furnished  office.  The  wood-paneled  walls  of  the  office  are 
lined  with  rare  prints  and  exotic  maritime  memorabilia.  Behind  Elster's  desk 
is  a  cavernous  window  with  such  a  panoramic  view  over  his  industrial  domain 
that  it  could  be  a  working  model  of  Jeremy  Bentham's  Inspection-House. 
From  this  window,  the  magnate  is  able  to  survey  the  entire  shipyard — from 
the  whirling  cranes  and  half-finished  hulls  to  the  small  army  of  shipworkers 
employed  in  this  large-scale,  labor-intensive  industrial  enterprise. 

The  two  men  are  comparing  rural  mid-nineteenth-century  with  indus- 
trial mid-twentieth-century  San  Francisco.  "Well,  San  Francisco's  changed," 
Elster  says  in  a  voice  as  meticulously  tailored  as  his  dark  business  suit.  "The 
things  that  spell  San  Francisco  to  me  are  disappearing  fast." 

"Like  all  this?"  Scottie  replies,  spreading  his  arms  as  he  walks  closer  to 
the  painting  of  San  Francisco  in  July  1849. 

"Yes,  I  should  have  liked  to  have  lived  there  then,"  Elster  confesses,  his 
clubby  voice  competing  with  the  hum  of  the  cranes  from  the  shipyard  out- 
side. He  sinks  back  into  his  leather  chair,  raises  his  eyes  toward  the  ceiling 
and  adds,  "Color,  excitement,  power,  freedom." 

At  first  glance,  this  conversation  between  the  wealthy  industrialist  and 
the  everyman  ex-cop  appears  to  be  a  private  social  interaction  between  two 
old  college  friends  to  whom  fate  had  dealt  very  different  hands.  But  its  real- 
ity is  the  reverse.  Everything  about  this  entirely  public  conversation  is  actu- 
ally a  lie.  It  doesn't  contain  a  single  word  of  truth. 

The  first  lie  is  that  we  are  watching  fiction  rather  than  real  life.  This 


86  ANDREW  KEEN 

meeting  between  Gavin  Elster  and  Scottie  Ferguson  is  actually  part  of 
Alfred  Hitchcock's  1958  motion  picture  Vertigo — a  lavishly  produced  and 
meticulously  staged  piece  of  mid-twentieth-century  Hollywood  drama  in 
which  we,  the  mass  audience,  paid  to  watch  professional  actors  playing  the 
private  lives  of  fictional  characters.  Everything  in  the  scene  from  this  Para- 
mount Studio-financed  production  is  invented — from  the  fake  painting  in 
the  fake  office^  to  the  fake  conversation^  between  the  two  men  to  the  fake 
Scottie  Ferguson  played  by  Jimmy  Stewart  and  the  fake  Gavin  Elster  played 
by  Tom  Helmore.  There  are  no  obvious  truths  in  this  scene  from  Vertigo.  It 
is  a  spiral"^  of  lies. 

The  painting  itself,  with  its  bucolic  landscape,  is  also  a  lie.  Instead  of  ru- 
ral heaven,  the  San  Francisco  of  July  1849  was  more  actually  like  a  protoin- 
dustrial  urban  hell.  Eighteen  months  earlier,  at  the  beginning  of  1848,  that 
fateful  year  of  failed  European  revolutions,  there  were  only  12,000  settlers 
in  California — making  it  more  like  the  idyllic  state  of  nature  represented  in 
the  picture  on  Elster  s  wall.  But  on  January  24,  1848,  an  eccentric  carpenter 
named  James  Marshall  discovered  gold  on  the  American  River  at  Sutters 
Mill,  a  sawmill  in  the  foothills  of  the  Sierra  mountains  some  fifty  miles  to 
the  northeast  of  San  Francisco  Bay.  By  December  1848,  President  Polk,  hav- 
ing confirmed  the  rumors  in  his  outgoing  message  to  Congress,  triggered  the 
most  dizzying  gold  rush  in  history,  a  mania  so  dramatic  that,  in  1849,  the 
population  of  the  increasingly  industrial  and  urban  San  Francisco  sometimes 
doubled  every  ten  days — a  meteoric  rate  of  social  growth  that  even  rivals  that 
of  the  Facebook  community  more  than  150  years  later.  In  1849  alone,  over 
500  vessels  left  eastern  ports  bound  for  the  San  Francisco  Bay,  packed  with 
tens  of  thousands  of  dreamers — Peggy  Noonan's  "gamblers,  bounders,  ne'er- 
do-wells,  third  sons  in  primogeniture  cultures" — all  seeking  to  escape  their 
pasts  and  pull  the  curtain  on  the  second  act  of  their  lives. 

But  even  the  "color,  excitement,  power  and  freedom"  that  Elster  roman- 
ticizes about  the  San  Francisco  of  1849  is  a  lie.  As  F.  Scott  Fitzgerald,  the 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  87 

chronicler  of  a  later  collective  bout  of  irrational  exuberance,  once  said,  in 
vivid  contrast  with  Peggy  Noonan's  reading  of  history,  "there  are  no  second 
acts  in  American  lives."^  And,  unfortunately,  this  was  true  for  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  the  "Forty-niners"  as  it  has  been  for  the  participants  in  every  other 
mania  in  American  history — from  the  Wall  Street  stock  market  boom  of 
the  1920s  that  Fitzgerald  himself  chronicled  in  The  Great  Gatshy,  to  the  ir- 
rational social  exuberance  of  the  sixties  counterculture,  to  the  dot.com  hys- 
teria of  the  late  nineties. 

"This  was  the  Gold  Rush  as  Iliad,  as  a  disastrous  expedition  to  foreign 
shores."^  So  Kevin  Starr,  the  author  of  a  much- acclaimed  multivolume  history 
of  California,  describes  the  San  Francisco  of  1849.  The  truth  is  that  these 
nineteenth-century  fortune  seekers  had,  like  Gavin  Elster,  fallen  in  love  with 
something  that,  for  the  most  part,  didn't  exist.  As  Gray  Brechin,  another 
chronicler  of  San  Francisco's  vertiginous  history,  noted,  "most  left  the  'dig- 
gings' bitterly  disappointed."''  By  the  summer  of  1849  San  Francisco  had 
become  a  high-tech  mining  camp  teeming  with  vagabondage,  alcoholism, 
sickness,  suicide  and  murder — an  antisocial  graveyard  of  broken  dreams  rather 
than  Elster's  idyllic  community  of  "color,  excitement,  power,  freedom." 

But  it's  the  third  lie  that  is  the  deadliest  of  them  all.  In  Hitchcock's  Ver- 
tigo, Scottie  is  being  set  up  by  Elster  to  fall  in  love  with  a  corpse.  The  ship- 
building magnate  has  invited  the  ex-cop  to  his  office  knowing  that  he  suffers 
from  vertigo,  a  pathological  fear  of  heights  with  which  he'd  been  afflicted 
after  failing  to  prevent  a  police  colleague  from  falling  to  his  death  from  a 
San  Francisco  rooftop.  His  vertigo  is  such  a  debilitating  affliction  that  even 
standing  on  a  chair  triggers  an  overpowering  feeling  of  dizziness  in  Scottie 
as  the  world  whirls  faster  and  faster  around  him.  It  has  disabled  the  former 
San  Francisco  detective.  He  no  longer  can  function  in  society. 

So,  after  spinning  his  disingenuous  nostalgia  about  the  San  Francisco 
of  July  1848,  Elster  invents  a  story  about  his  wife  Madeleine's  obsession 
with  a  suicidal  nineteenth-century  ancestor  and  hires  Scottie  to  shadow 


88  ANDREW  KEEN 

the  beautiful  young  woman  as  she  drives  around  the  city.  And  thus  begins 
Scottie  Ferguson's  disastrous  expedition  to  foreign  shores.  You  see,  the 
blonde  whom  Scottie  follows  around  and  around  the  twisted  streets  of  San 
Francisco  is  a  trap.  Madeleine  Elster  is  anything  but  her  own  image.  She  is  a 
fake,  who,  not  unlike  today's  technologies  of  social  shopping,  has  been  de- 
signed to  seduce  and  coerce  him. 

Contrary  to  Mark  Zuckerberg's  dictum  that  we  all  only  have  one  iden- 
tity, Madeleine  the  ethereal  blonde  is  also  Judy  the  earthy  brunette.  She  has 
taken  Eric  Schmidt's  advice  and  reinvented  herself  Rather  than  Madeleine 
Elster,  she  is  actually  Elster's  young  mistress,  a  dark-haired  store  assistant 
from  Kansas  called  Judy  Barton,^  who,  by  dying  her  hair  and  wearing  exqui- 
sitely designed  outfits,^  is  only  playing  the  role  of  the  shipping  heiress. 

At  first,  the  plan  works  perfectly.  Scottie  is  transformed  into  Jeremy  Ben- 
tham's  voyeuristic  fantasy — the  eye  of  the  ubiquitous  camera,  Madeleine's 
shadow,  the  inspector  of  all  her  movements.  First  he  follows  her  to  San  Fran- 
cisco's little  Mission  Dolores  Church  where,  from  behind  a  gravestone,  he 
watches  her  put  flowers  on  her  nineteenth-century  ancestor's  grave.  He  then 
follows  Madeleine  to  the  city's  Palace  of  the  Legion  of  Honor  Museum 
where  he  watches  from  behind  a  door  as  the  mesmerized  young  woman  gazes 
at  a  painting  of  her  ancestor — a  beautiful,  bejeweled  figure  who  so  resembles 
Madeleine  that  she  might  have  been  narcissistically  gazing  at  herself  in  a 
mirror. 

The  ex-detective  not  only  suffers  from  vertigo,  but  from  a  compulsive 
voyeurism — a  condition  we  might  dub  "social  eyes."  All  he  can  do  is  watch 
Madeleine.  As  Francois  TrufFaut  remarked  about  Jimmy  Stewart's  role  as 
Scottie  Ferguson,  he  "isn't  required  to  emote:  he  simply  looks — three  or  four 
hundred  times."^^  Indeed,  Scottie  becomes  so  completely  transfixed  by  Judy's 
reinvented  identity  as  a  San  Francisco  heiress  that,  having  fished  the  blonde 
out  of  the  Bay  from  underneath  the  Golden  Gate  Bridge  afi:er  she  dreamily 
stumbles  into  the  water,  he  falls  in  love  with  her.  The  murderous  crime  then 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  89 

unfolds.  Elster  kills  his  real  wife  and  hurls  her  corpse  from  the  top  of  a 
church  tower  at  the  same  moment  that  the  fake  Madeleine  stages  a  suicidal 
leap  from  this  same  building.  Meanwhile,  the  vertigo-afflicted  Scottie,  dou- 
bly traumatized  by  his  inability  to  follow  Madeleine  up  the  twisting  stair- 
case of  the  tower  and  by  her  seemingly  tragic  death,  suffers  a  nervous 
breakdown  and  is  institutionalized  in  a  San  Francisco  mental  asylum. 

Among  the  many  reason  critics  see  Vertigo  as  Hitchcock's  creepiest  in- 
vestigation of  the  human  condition^ ^  lies  in  the  haunting  sequence  of 
scenes  that  follow  the  fake  suicide.  After  Scottie 's  release  from  the  asylum, 
he,  by  chance,  bumps  into  Judy  Barton — who  has,  in  the  meantime,  been 
abandoned  by  Elster — on  a  San  Francisco  street.  Glimpsing  his  original 
lover  in  Judy  (but  not  having  access  to  facial  recognition  technology  so  he 
can  recognize  her  real  identity),  he  picks  her  up  and  then  forces  the  bru- 
nette to  dye  her  hair  and  to  dress  herself  in  Madeleine's  clothes.  And  so  the 
store  assistant  from  Kansas  once  again  transforms  herself  into  the  ship- 
building heiress,  thereby  enabling  Scottie,  who  sees  his  beloved  Madeleine 
in  everyone  and  everything,  to  first  resurrect  and  then  make  love  to  a 
corpse. 

The  savage  truth  is  finally  revealed  to  Scottie  in  Vertigo's  penultimate 
scene.  Just  as  Judy  slips  back  into  playing  Madeleine,  she  gives  herself  away 
by  putting  on  a  bloodred  necklace  that  had  also  been  worn  by  the  original 
Madeleine.  It  is  the  most  haunting  few  seconds  in  the  movie.  Finally,  he  sees 
the  woman's  real  image — as  a  fake  and  an  accomplice  to  murder.  The  camera 
freezes  momentarily  on  Scottie's  half  opened  mouth  and  unblinking  blue 
eyes  as  he  silently  grasps  the  crime  to  which  he's  been  exposed,  both  as  an 
innocent  accomplice  and  victim. ^^  At  first  it  seems  that  his  epiphany — the 
realization  that  everything  he  had  believed  in  was  a  lie — would  have  a  ca- 
thartic impact  on  Scottie.  But,  Hitchcock  being  Hitchcock,  even  this  ca- 
tharsis turns  out  to  be  a  delusion. 

"One  final  thing  I  have  to  do  and  then  I'll  be  free  of  the  past,"  Scottie 


90  ANDREW  KEEN 

tells  Judy  in  the  movie's  final  scene  as  they  drive  south  from  San  Francisco 
down  toward  the  eighteenth-century  mission  settlement  of  San  Juan  Bau- 
tista,  the  site  of  the  original  crime. 

"One  doesn't  often  get  a  second  chance — you  are  my  second  chance," 
Scottie  then  breathlessly  tells  her  as,  overcoming  his  dizzying  fear  of  heights, 
he  drags  Judy  back  up  the  twisted  staircase  of  the  church  tower  where  the 
murdered  body  of  Madeleine  Elster  was  hurled  to  the  ground.  But  it's  not 
really  a  second  chance — as  F.  Scott  Fitzgerald  reminds  us,  they  are  mostly 
illusionary  in  the  lottery  of  American  life. 

So  instead  of  completely  freeing  himself  of  his  past,  Vertigo  ends  with  a 
second  corpse,  Judy's  frightened  leap  from  the  tower  and  the  death  of  all 
Scottie 's  dreams.  Thus  behind  Hitchcock's  Vertigo  lies  two  great  corpses,  or 
perhaps  three,  if  you  include  Scottie  Ferguson,  the  deluded  and  solitary  soul 
who  fell  in  love  with  a  chimera — something  that  didn't  and  couldn't  exist. 

Color,  Excitement,  Power,  Freedom 

Not  quite  everything  in  Vertigo  is  invented.  While  the  scene  in  Elster's  office 
was  filmed  in  a  Hollywood  studio,  some  of  the  movie  really  was  made  on  lo- 
cation in  the  San  Francisco  Bay  Area.  Judy  Barton  s  fake  suicidal  jump  into 
the  Bay,  for  example,  was  filmed  in  early  October  1957  under  the  Golden 
Gate  Bridge,  while  her  suicidal  leap  from  the  church  tower  really  did  get  shot 
a  couple  of  weeks  later  in  San  Juan  Bautista — the  little  town  southeast  of  San 
Jose,  the  Bay  Area  city  that  today  is  the  epicenter  of  Silicon  Valley. 

"Yes,  I  should  have  liked  to  have  lived  there  then — color,  excitement, 
power,  freedom,"  you'll  remember  Gavin  Elster  saying,  with  disingenuous 
nostalgia,  about  "San  Francisco  in  July  1849."  But  would  it  be  equally  disin- 
genuous to  borrow  these  words  as  a  description  of  mid-twentieth-century  San 
Francisco  Bay  Area?  Was  there  color,  excitement,  power,  freedom  in  the  place 
where  Hitchcock  made  his  timeless  picture? 

To  borrow  another  of  Elster's  words,  the  Bay  Area  certainly  has  changed 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  91 

over  the  last  half  century,  particularly  its  economy.  Back  in  October  1957, 
power — or  at  least  economic  power — was  held  by  large  scale,  hierarchical 
organizations  along  the  lines  of  Elster's  fictional  shipbuilding  company — 
firms^^  with  the  logistic  and  organizational  power  to  mass  manufacture  me- 
chanical products  for  the  industrial  networked  economy.  This  local  economy 
was,  therefore,  dominated  by  companies  such  as  the  peninsula's  largest  em- 
ployer, the  defense  and  aircraft  manufacturer  Lockheed  and  electronics  man- 
ufacturers like  Westinghouse,  General  Electric,  IBM  and  Sylvania.  Many  of 
these  firms  still  operated  on  the  scientific  management  principles  of  the  late- 
nineteenth-century  mechanical  engineer  Frederick  Winslow  Taylor — a 
thinker  deeply  indebted  to  Jeremy  Bentham's  surveillant  utilitarianism — 
which  prioritized  quantifiable  workplace  efficiency  and  productivity  over 
more  human  or  creative  goals. 

This  large  organizational  arrangement  is  what  social  media  evangelists 
John  Hagel  and  John  Seely  Brown  describe  as  a  "push"  economy.  "In  a  push 
system  there  is  a  hierarchy,  with  those  in  charge  offering  rewards  (or  punish- 
ments) to  those  lower  down  the  ladder,"  Hagel  and  Seely  Brown  describe 
the  top-down  power  structure  of  the  firm  in  mid-twentieth-century  life. 
"The  people  participating  in  push  programs  are  generally  treated  as  instru- 
ments to  ensure  that  activities  are  performed  as  dictated.  Their  own  individ- 
ual needs  and  interests  are  purely  secondary,  if  relevant  at  all."'"^ 

It  was  large  hierarchical  industrial  firms  like  Lockheed,  GE  and  Westing- 
house  which  employed  the  "Organization  Man,"  a  term  popularized  by  i^(9r- 
/^/«^  magazine  business  journalist  William  H.  Whyte  in  his  1956  best-selling 
critique  of  the  conformity  of  this  push  economy.  According  to  Whyte,  these 
Organization  Men  were  neither  the  industrial  laborers  nor  the  white-collar 
workers  of  traditional  industrial  society.  "These  people  work  for  The  Orga- 
nization," he  observed.  "They  are  the  ones  of  our  middle  class  who  have 
left  home,  spiritually  as  well  as  physically,  to  take  the  vows  of  organizational 
life."  But  what  most  concerned  Whyte  was  the  replacement  of  the  individual 


92  ANDREW  KEEN 

with  the  group  as  a  supposed  "creative  vehicle"  for  business  innovation.  In 
his  concern  for  the  rights  of  the  individual,  Whyte  echoed  earlier  critics 
of  collective  thinking  like  John  Stuart  Mill  and  George  Orwell.  "The  most 
misguided  attempt  at  false  collectivization  is  the  current  attempt  to  see  the 
group  as  a  creative  vehicle.  Can  it  be?"  he  asked  rhetorically.  "People  very 
rarely  think  in  groups;  they  talk  together,  they  exchange  information,  they 
adjudicate,  they  make  compromises.  But  they  do  not  think;  they  do  not 
create."^^ 

As  David  Halberstam  notes  in  his  history  of  the  fifties,  the  "conformity  of 
American  life"  had,  by  the  middle  of  the  decade,  become  "a  major  intellectual 
debate"  attracting  not  only  social  critics  like  Whyte,  John  Kenneth  Galbraith 
and  C.  Wright  Mills,  but  also  novelists  like  Sloan  Wilson. ^^  Wilson  con- 
fronted the  problem  of  group-think  and  spiritual  impoverishment  in  his  1955 
best-selling  The  Man  in  the  Gray  Flannel  Suit,  a  novel  that  was  turned  into  a 
1956  movie  featuring  the  music  of  Bernard  Herrmann,  the  composer  who 
also  wrote  the  score  for  Vertigo.  But  whereas  Herrmann's  romantically  gar- 
ish music  in  Hitchcock's  movie  provided  a  suitably  exaggerated  soundtrack  to 
this  apotheosis  of  cinematic  voyeurism,  his  work  in  The  Man  in  the  Gray  Flan- 
nel Suit  is  more  muted  and  private.  That's  because  the  picture  reflected  both 
the  fragmented  social  reality  of  the  fifties  as  well  as  the  growing  disenchant- 
ment with  the  human  costs  of  its  impersonal  economic  system,  its  industrial 
technology,  and  its  work  culture.  This  is  a  movie  about  marketing  executives 
at  large  media  companies  who,  ironically,  can't  communicate  and  whose  pub- 
lic and  private  lives  have  become  so  disconnected  that  they  are  alienated  from 
their  colleagues,  their  friends,  their  families  and  themselves.  It  was  a  society, 
many  believed,  of  too  much  private  affluence  and  not  enough  public  good — a 
world  that  sixties  activist  and  chronicler  Todd  Gitlin  described  as  "cornucopia 
and  its  discontents." 

But  alongside  this  monochromic  industrial  culture,  the  region,  especially 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  93 


the  Santa  Clara  Valley,  also  possessed  a  less  discontented  cornucopia — a  col- 
orful and  thriving  agricultural  economy.  Indeed,  had  Alfred  Hitchcock  and 
his  Vertigo  production  crew  chosen  to  take  Interstate  101  on  their  journey 
from  the  Golden  Gate  Bridge  down  to  San  Juan  Bautista  they  would  have 
driven  through  a  pastoral  landscape  so  redolent  with  the  color  and  aroma  of 
its  cherry  and  apricot  orchards  that  it  was  still  known  locally  as  the  "valley 
of  heart's  delight."  Back  in  the  fall  of  1957,  you  see,  Silicon  Valley  didn't  ex- 
ist.^^  There  was  no  fifty-mile  sprawl  of  high-tech  office  parks  merging  San 
Francisco  with  San  Jose,  no  collective  congestion  on  101,  no  smart  posses  of 
entrepreneurs  in  their  Toyota  Prius  hybrids  and  Bentley  convertibles  chas- 
ing the  next  big  social  thing,  no  roadside  electronic  billboards  every  mile 
flashing  advertisements  for  the  hottest  new  network.  Back  then,  the  Bay 
Area's  future — a  social  future  that  is  now  spinning  faster  and  faster  around 
all  of  us — had  only  just  been  invented. 

The  Arrival  of  the  Future 

That  future  was  the  digital  computer.  The  analogue  computer,  as  a  mechani- 
cal calculating  machine,  had  existed,  in  theory  at  least,  since  the  year  after 
Jeremy  Bentham's  death,  having  been  conceived  by  the  English  polymath 
Charles  Babbage  as  the  "Difference  Engine"  in  1833,  just  a  year  after  Ben- 
tham's corpse  first  appeared  in  public,  and  then  tinkered  with  until  Bab- 
bage's  own  death  in  1871.  Over  the  next  century,  the  technology  of  analogue 
computers  matured  considerably,  but — to  cram  a  hundred  years  of  remark- 
ably complex  scientific,  mathematic  and  technical  development  into  a  single 
sentence^^ — its  functionality  was  always  compromised  by  the  prodigious 
amount  of  electricity  required  to  power  these  machines  and,  as  a  consequence, 
by  their  unwieldy  size  and  heat.  What  solved  these  hitherto  intractable  prob- 
lems and  transformed  the  mechanical  computer  from  a  technological  curi- 
osity into  the  central  reality  of  contemporary  social  life  was  the  invention  of 


94  ANDREW  KEEN 

the  transistor,  a  silicon-based  semiconductor  device  that  enabled  solid-state 
amplification  of  power  and  the  seemingly  limitless  miniaturization  of  elec- 
tric circuits. 

Like  James  Watt's  eighteenth-century  invention  of  the  steam  engine  or 
Thomas  Edison's  nineteenth-century  invention  of  the  electric  lightbulb,  its 
invention  is  one  of  those  once-in-a-century  technological  transformations 
that  turned  the  conventional  world  upside  down.  Newsweek  senior  editor 
and  Silicon  Valley  chronicler  David  Kaplan  described  this  transistor  as  the 
"substructure  of  the  future"  and  "elemental  to  the  digital  age."^^  Without 
this  little  transistor,  there  would  be  no  personal  computer  or  Internet,  no 
smartphones  or  smart  televisions,  no  Tweetie,  foursquare  or  Facebook  Open 
Graph,  no  central  digital  tissue  of  society,  and  no  age  of  networked  intelli- 
gence. Without  the  little  transistor,  the  future — our  social  future — still 
wouldn't  exist. 

This  future  had  actually  been  discovered  ten  years  before  Hitchcock 
came  to  the  Bay  Area  to  film  Vertigo.  Three  Nobel  prize-winning  physicists — 
William  Shockley,  John  Bardeen,  and  Walter  Brattain — invented  the  tran- 
sistor at  the  Bell  Labs  in  New  Jersey  in  1947.  But  it  was  Shockley,  one  of  the 
twentieth  century's  most  prescient  scientists  and,  in  the  words  of  Mike 
Malone,  "the  first  citizen  of  Silicon  Valley,"  who  exported  the  transistor  to 
the  San  Francisco  Bay  Area.  Shockley,  a  native  of  Palo  Alto,  had  thought 
deeply  about  what  he  called  the  "electric  brain"  and  he  understood  that  the 
transistor  would  provide  the  "ideal  nerve  cell"  for  computing  machines.^^ 
Returning  to  the  Bay  Area  in  1956  and  assembling  a  team  of  some  of  the  most 
gifted  young  scientists  in  America — including  Gordon  Moore,  a  twenty-seven- 
year-old  Caltech  graduate  who  grew  up  in  Pescadero,  a  Pacific  coast  fishing 
village  on  the  other  side  of  the  Santa  Cruz  mountains — he  set  up  Shockley 
Semiconductor  Laboratory,  a  start-up  dedicated  to  the  commercial  develop- 
ment of  the  transistor. 

But  there  was  a  problem  with  this  plan.  In  addition  to  being  a  scientific 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  95 

genius,  Silicon  Valley's  first  citizen  was,  perhaps  not  entirely  uncoinciden- 
tally,  a  shameless  narcissist,  whose  antisocial  behavior  made  him  uniquely 
unsuited  to  leading  this  all-star  technology  team.  So  in  September  1957,  a 
couple  of  weeks  before  Hitchcock  filmed  a  false  Madeleine  Elster  faking 
her  suicide  underneath  the  Golden  Gate  Bridge,  the  so-called  "Traitorous 
Eight" — a  group  of  America's  most  brilliant  young  physicists  and  electrical 
engineers  including  Gordon  Moore  and  Robert  Noyce,  his  later  co-founder 
of  InteF^ — left  Shockley  Semiconductor  Laboratory  to  found  what  David 
Kaplan  calls  "Silicon  Valley's  greatest  hardware  company." 

It  was  called  Fairchild  Semiconductor  and  it  was  based  in  Mountain 
View,  the  peninsula  town  near  Stanford  University  where  the  Googleplex, 
Google's  global  headquarters,  is  now  located.  Not  only  was  Fairchild  Semi- 
conductor the  mother  of  Silicon  Valley  start-ups,  later  spawning  companies 
like  Intel  and  Advanced  Micro  Devices  (AMD),  but  it  was  also  the  first. 
Founded  in  October  1957  and  funded  by  Arthur  Rock,  the  first  Califor- 
nian  venture  capitalist,  Fairchild  Semiconductor  was  the  first  company  that 
discovered  the  rich  vein  of  gold  in  the  transistor.  It  was,  as  Mike  Malone 
explains,  a  dizzying  moment,  equivalent  in  historical  vertigo  to  James  Mar- 
shall's discovery  of  gold  at  Sutter's  Mill  in  January  1848. 

It  was  as  if  a  door  had  been  flung  open,  Malone  explains.  "The  scientists  at 
Fairchild  suddenly  looked  down  into  a  bottomless  abyss  microscoping  from 
the  visible  world  into  that  of  atoms — an  abyss  that  promised  blinding  speed 
and  power,  the  ultimate  calculating  machine.  When  they  let  their  minds 
wander  they  realized  that  not  just  one  transistor  could  be  put  on  a  chip,  but 
even  ten,  maybe  a  hundred For  Christ's  sake,  millions.  It  was  dizzying."^^ 

It  was  so  dizzying,  in  fact,  that  in  1965  Gordon  Moore  coined  his  own 
law  to  explain  the  transformational  power  of  the  transistor.  Moore's  Law,  as 
it  has  come  to  be  universally  known,  correctly  predicted  that  the  number 
of  transistors  that  could  be  placed  on  a  computer  chip  would  double — yes, 
double — every  two  years.  This  biannual  doubling  in  computational  power 


96  ANDREW  KEEN 

has  not  only  enabled  faster  and  faster  and  tinier  and  tinier  personal  comput- 
ers, but  also  in  the  pervasive  Internet  and  our  contemporary  mania  with  so- 
cial media. 

Moore's  Law — the  model  for  Zuckerberg's  Law  about  the  annual  dou- 
bling of  networked  personal  information — has  become  the  single  constant 
of  our  vertiginous  digital  age.  It  is  both  the  engine  of  perpetual  economic 
and  technological  innovation  as  well  as  the  cause  of  what  Austrian  econo- 
mist Joseph  Schumpeter,  in  a  more  aphoristic  law,  described  as  the  "creative 
destruction"  inevitably  wrought  by  the  capitalist  free  market. ^^  Moore's  and 
Schumpeter's  laws  explain  why  there  are  no  longer  any  cherry  or  apricot  or- 
chards in  the  valley  of  heart's  delight.  And  they  are  also  the  reasons  why,  in 
the  words  of  veteran  New  York  Times  technology  writer  John  MarkofF,  "per- 
haps more  than  any  region,  Silicon  Valley  has  transformed  the  world  in  the 
last  half  century."^^ 

But  like  one  of  Hitchcock's  great  corpses,  the  history  of  Silicon  Valley  isn't 
quite  as  straightforward  as  it  first  appears.  Just  as  Vertigo  is  more  than  just  a 
kinky  fifties  picture  about  necrophilia  on  the  twisted  streets  of  San  Francisco, 
so  the  real  history  of  Silicon  Valley  isn't  simply  a  cheerful  Whiggish  narrative 
about  the  progressive  impact  of  ever  shrinking  electric  circuit  boards  upon  an 
increasingly  networked  humanity.  No,  the  contemporary  digital  revolution — 
like  the  nineteenth-century  industrial  revolution — is  too  epochal  an  event  in 
human  history,  too  great  a  journey  to  foreign  shores,  to  be  seen  deterministi- 
cally,  purely  as  a  consequence  of  technological  innovation. 

The  idea  of  technology  as  the  first  mover,  as  the-thing-in-itself  that  trig- 
gers all  consequent  social,  economic  and  cultural  change,  is  a  trap  into  which 
both  smart  techno-skeptics  and  techno-utopians  alike — from  Kevin  Kelly 
to  Nicholas  Carr^^ — have  fallen.  Thus,  as  Richard  Florida  argues,  "the  deep 
and  enduring  changes  of  our  age  are  not  technological  but  social  and  cul- 
tural."^^  Florida  is  correct  to  present  social  and  cultural  change — as  well,  of 
course,  as  economic — as  at  least  equal  to  technology  in  terms  of  shaping  our 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  97 

digital  age.  In  parallel,  therefore,  with  the  innovation  of  technologists  like 
the  Traitorous  Eight,  the  history  of  Silicon  Valley  must  also  be  understood 
in  terms  of  its  social  values,  moral  judgments  and  economic  ideas — in  the 
context  of  what  some  sociologists  would  call  its  "ideology."  And  it's  in  the 
complex  architecture  of  these  collective  ideas,  rather  than  that  the  simpler 
architecture  of  an  electric  circuit,  where  the  origins  of  today's  digital  cult  of 
the  social  can  be  most  effectively  excavated. 

But  to  get  to  this  excavation,  we  need  to  return  to  the  earlier  question 
about  the  mid-twentieth-century  Bay  Area.  The  truth  is  that,  in  spite  of  its 
technicolored  orchards,  the  San  Francisco  Bay  Area — with  its  monochrome 
industrial  infrastructure  of  large  electronics,  defense  and  energy  compa- 
nies managed  by  supposedly  repressed  and  repressive  Organizational  Men — 
was  neither  a  strikingly  exciting  nor  a  colorful  place  in  the  fall  of  1957.  Yet 
this  would  change  dramatically  over  the  next  decade.  Between  1957  and 
1967  the  Bay  Area  experienced  such  a  powerful  explosion  of  social  color  and 
excitement  that  the  region — and,  indeed,  the  world — has  never  been  quite 
the  same  since. 

The  Love- In 

By  1967,  the  people  of  San  Francisco  had  replaced  their  gray  flannel  suits 
with  rainbow-colored  clothes  and  psychedelic  scarves.  By  1967,  love  had 
usurped  scientific  management  as  the  metric  of  human  value.  By  1967,  the 
cornucopia  of  hidden  discontent  had  been  substituted  by  a  cornucopia  of 
transparent  desire.  And,  by  1967,  tens  of  thousands  of  San  Franciscans  had, 
like  poor  Scottie  Ferguson,  fallen  in  love  with  something  that  didn't  really 
exist. 

"If you  re  going  to  San  Francisco,  be  sure  to  wear  some  flowers  in  your  hair^ 
sang  Scott  McKenzie  in  mid-June  1967  at  the  Monterey  Pop  Festival  TKe 
song  was  called  "San  Francisco  (Be  Sure  to  Wear  Some  Flowers  in  Your 
Hair)"  and  John  Philips,  the  lyricist  of  the  Mamas  and  Papas  and  one  of  the 


98  ANDREW  KEEN 

organizers  of  the  festival,  had  written  it  especially  for  McKenzie  to  be  de- 
buted at  Monterey. 

Rather  than  a  single  song,  however,  Monterey  debuted  an  entire  epoch. 
Like  Fairchild  Semiconductor,  the  three-day  Monterey  Pop  Festival — with 
its  social  focus  of  bringing  together  many  different  musicians  and  a  large, 
diverse  audience  of  strangers — was  the  first  of  its  kind.  Just  as  the  company 
founded  by  the  Traitorous  Eight  would  spawn  larger  chip  companies  like  Intel 
and  AMD,  so  Monterey  would  inspire  larger  social  music  festivals  like  Wood- 
stock and  Altamont.  And  just  as  Fairchild  Semiconductor  was  more  than  an- 
other high-tech  company,  so  the  Monterey  Pop  Festival  was  more  than  just 
another  musical  event. 

In  mid-June  1967,  a  crowd  of  at  least  50,000 — some  estimate  as  many 
as  100,000 — intimate  strangers,  had  come  down  the  northern  Californian 
coast  to  Monterey,  a  Spanish  colonial  town  not  far  from  the  old  mission  of 
San  Luis  Bautista  where  Hitchcock  filmed  the  suicide  scenes  in  Vertigo. 
They  came,  some  with  flowers  in  their  hair,  for  the  festival,  not  only  to  hear 
Scott  McKenzie,  Jimmy  Hendrix  and  Janis  Joplin,  the  Who,  the  Mamas 
and  the  Papas,  and  the  Grateful  Dead,  but  also  to  celebrate  a  fresh  flowering 
of  togetherness  that  appeared  to  signify  a  new  beginning,  a  second  chance 
for  America  and  the  world  to  unite  together  as  friends. 

''If  you're  going  to  San  Francisco,  you're  gonna  meet  some  gentle  people 
there," Scott  McKenzie  sang  at  Monterey.  "San  Francisco  (Be  Sure  to  Wear 
Some  Flowers  in  Your  Hair)"  both  created  and  reflected  the  Zeitgeist  of  the 
age.  It  became  an  instant  number  one  hit  around  the  world,  selling  more 
than  7  million  copies  and  emerging  as  the  anthem  of  social  togetherness  for 
the  sixties'  counterculture. 

It  was  indeed  the  promise  of  meeting  people  that  drew  so  many  thousands 
of  people  to  Monterey  in  June  1967.  As  much  as  a  music  concert,  the  three- 
day  event  was  a  social  experiment  in  sharing,  in  bringing  people  together 
through  music,  in  transforming  strangers  into  friends.  At  Monterey,  there 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  99 

was  a  breakdown  of  the  rigid  fifties  boundaries  between  public  and  private 
life  and,  as  a  consequence,  the  creation  of  a  new  transparent  pubhc  space  de- 
signed to  create  intimacy  amongst  strangers.  The  children  of  1967  even  in- 
vented language  for  this  kind  of  social  orgy:  they  called  it  a  "love-in." 

"If  you  come  to  San  Francisco,"  Scott  McKenzie  promised  the  tens  of 
thousands  who  came  to  Monterey,  "summertime  will  he  a  love-in  there'' 

"Haven't  you  ever  been  to  a  love-in?"  a  wide-eyed  young  woman  asks  her 
interviewer  at  the  beginning  of  D.  A.  Pennebaker's  Monterey  Pop,^^  the  de- 
finitive documentary  movie  about  the  festival.  "It's  gonna  be  like  Easter  and 

New  Year  and  Christmas  and  your  birthday  all  together The  vibrations 

are  just  going  to  be  flowing  everywhere." 

The  summer  of  1967  certainly  began  as  if  every  day  was  Easter,  New 
Year,  Christmas  and  all  of  our  birthdays.  "Love,  love,  love,  love,  love,  love, 
love,  love,  love.  There's  nothingyou  can  do  that  cant  he  done,"  S2sv^  the  Beatles 
in  "All  You  Need  Is  Love,"  the  other  big  hit  that  summer.  In  fact,  the  Mon- 
terey Pop  Festival  marked  the  beginning  of  the  Summer  of  Love,  a  two-year- 
long countercultural  experiment  in  friendship,  sharing  and  collaboration. 

June  1967  was  like  a  predigital  Occupy  Wall  Street.  Globally  headquar- 
tered in  San  Francisco's  Haight-Ashbury  neighborhood,  the  Summer  of 
Love  represented  an  audacious  attempt  to  unite  all  the  "gentle  people"  of  the 
world.  Behind  the  lurid  headlines  of  sex,  drugs  and  rock  'n'  roll,  the  people 
who  came  to  the  city  in  the  summer  of  1967  were  seeking  the  loving  ideal 
of  global  social  connectivity — what  the  San  Francisco  Oracle,  sounding  like 
Don  Tapscott  or  Umair  Haque,  described  as  the  "renaissance  of  compassion, 
awareness,  and  love,  and  the  revelation  of  unity  for  all  mankind."  ^^ 

This  ideal  of  the  unity  for  all  mankindhccdiUit  a  central,  if  not  the  central 
theme  of  the  counterculture.  As  sixties  historian  Todd  Gitlin  explains,  it 
represented  "hippie  as  communard:  the  ideal  of  a  social  bond  that  could  bring 
all  hurt,  yearning  souls  into  sweet  collectivity,  beyond  the  realm  of  scarcity 
and  the  resulting  pettiness  and  aggression."^^  According  to  Gitlin,  between 


100  ANDREW  KEEN 

50,000  and  75,000  people  flocked  to  the  1967  love-in  on  Haight-Ashbury 
to  openly  share  their  possessions,  their  minds,  their  bodies,  their  good  vibra- 
tions, their  stimulants,  their  pasts  and  their  futures. 

"All  across  the  nation  such  a  strange  vibration,  people  in  motion"  sang  Scott 
McKenzie  at  Monterey.  "There's  a  whole  generation  with  a  new  explanation" 
But  what,  exactly,  was  this  "new  explanation"  and  who,  precisely,  was  doing 
the  explaining  during  the  Summer  of  Love? 

Social  Man 

The  intellectual  origins  of  this  cultural  rebellion  can  be  traced  back  to  the 
time  when  the  Traitorous  Eight  were  setting  up  shop  in  Mountain  View  and 
Hitchcock  was  filming  Vertigo.  In  September  1957,  a  month  before  the  cre- 
ation of  Fairchild  Semiconductor,  Jack  Kerouac's  On  the  Road  had  been 
published, ^^  and  quickly  became  an  explanation  for  an  entire  generation — 
including  Bob  Dylan,  who  confessed  to  Beat  poet  Allen  Ginsberg  that  it 
"changed  my  life  like  it  changed  everyone  else's."  Kerouac  changed  every- 
one's life  by  transforming  the  cornucopia  of  discontent  into  literature  and, 
as  a  peripatetic  bohemian,  an  outsider  on  the  edge  of  society,  sneering  at  the 
supposedly  inauthentic  conventions  of  contemporary  family,  school,  suburb 
and  workplace.  With  other  libertarian  Beat  poets  like  Ginsburg,  Timothy 
Leary  and  Gary  Snyder,  Kerouac  challenged  every  form  of  traditional 
authority — from  mainstream  media  and  big  government  to  The  Organiza- 
tion and  The  Man  in  the  Gray  Flannel  Suit.  This  was  the  new  vibration:  a 
colorful  eruption  of  bohemianism  against  what  the  Frankfurt  School  Marx- 
ist philosopher  Herbert  Marcuse  called,  in  his  unlikely  1964  best-seller,  the 
One-Dimensional  Man,  conventional  industrial  society. 

But  the  new  explanation  went  beyond  the  bohemian  rebellion  of  the 
Beatniks  against  traditional  authority.  This  was  a  communal  uprising  that, 
to  borrow  some  language  from  London  School  of  Economics  sociologist 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  101 

Richard  Sennett,  had  a  "collective  personality  generated  by  a  common  fan- 
tasy." And  that  fantasy  was  centered  on  what  Sennett  calls  "the  intimacy  of 
social  relations."  In  parallel  with  the  radical  libertarianism  of  the  Bohemian 
rebel,  lay  the  communitarian  idealism  of  sixties  radicals  like  Marcuse  and 
the  writer  Paul  Goodman,  whom  historian  Theodore  Roszak  called  the  "fore- 
most tribune"  of  the  counterculture.^^ 

As  engineers  of  the  human  soul,  theorists  like  Marcuse  and  Goodman 
were  trying  to  create  a  new  version  of  mankind,  upgrading  the  fifties  corpo- 
rate One-Dimensional  Man  with  a  social  version  of  man,  the  unifier  of  all 
humanity.  Their  communitarian  belief  system  rested  upon  a  Gavin  Elster- 
style  nostalgia  for  an  invented  past,  a  preindustrial  world  of  hearts'  delight, 
a  perpetual  love-in  where  a  "scaled  down"  industrialism  would  serve  as  a 
"handmaiden  to  the  ethos  of  village  or  neighborhood."  Whether  it  was  Paul 
Goodman's  atavistic  faith  in  restoring  the  communities  of  precolonial  Indi- 
ans, or  Herbert  Marcuse's  theories  of  man's  spiritual  alienation  from  capi- 
talism and  his  promise  of  a  postrevolutionary  social  unity,  or  the  voluntary 
primitivism  of  hippie  communalist  groups  like  the  San  Francisco  Diggers, 
the  end  result  was  the  same  embrace  of  an  imaginary  collective  social  past, 
that  same  connected  oral  culture  that  social  Utopians  like  Don  Tapscott  and 
Jeff  Jarvis  now  idealize.  As  Walter  Benjamin,  another  luminary  of  the 
Frankfurt  School  put  it,  "the  Utopian  images  that  accompany  the  emergence 
of  the  new  always  concurrently  reach  back  to  the  ur-past."^^ 

Their  faith  in  the  communal  purity  of  the  past  certainly  wasn't  new.  Two 
centuries  earlier,  Jean-Jacques  Rousseau  had  reached  back  into  the  ur-past 
and  launched  a  similar  assault  on  the  supposed  heartlessness  and  inequali- 
ties of  society.  In  the  invaluable  five  volume  A  History  of  Private  Life,  the 
French  historian  Jean  Marie  Goulemont  describes  Rousseau's  obsession 
with  "the  idea  of  a  citizenry  transparent  to  itself"^^  As  Rousseau  himself 
wrote  with  characteristic  communitarian  nostalgia  in  his  1758  Letter  to 


102  ANDREW  KEEN 

D'Alembert,  "what  peoples  have  better  grounds  to  assemble  often,  and  to 
form  among  themselves  the  sweet  bonds  of  pleasure  and  joy  than  those  who 
have  so  many  reasons  for  loving  one  another  and  remaining  always  united?"^'^ 

If  only  we  could  reach  back,  the  logic  of  Goodman  and  Marcuses  Rous- 
seauian  nostalgia  went,  back  before  Lockheed  and  IBM,  back  before  The 
Organization  Man  and  the  military-industrial  complex,  back  to  when  every- 
body wore  flowers  in  their  hair,  back  to  the  authentic  society  of  the  village  or 
neighborhood — then  we  would  rediscover  the  real  color,  the  excitement,  the 
power  and  the  freedom  of  what  it  supposedly  meant  to  be  human. 

In  "The  18th  Brumaire  of  Louis  Bonaparte,"  his  essay  about  the  failed 
French  Revolution  of  1848,  Herbert  Marcuse's  muse,  Karl  Marx,  argued 
that  "men  make  their  own  history,  but  they  do  not  make  it  as  they  please; 
they  do  not  make  it  under  circumstances  chosen  by  themselves,  but  under 
circumstances  directly  encountered,  given  and  transmitted  from  the  past."^^ 
And  this  was  as  true  in  1848  as  in  1967  or,  for  that  matter,  as  in  2011,  the 
year  of  the  Protestor.  You  see,  for  all  their  obsession  with  preindustrial  com- 
munity during  the  Summer  of  Love,  the  tens  of  thousands  who  flocked  to 
the  love-ins  on  Haight-Ashbury  in  1967  were,  in  Theodore  Roszak's  words, 
"technocracy's  children" — products  of  the  very  leviathan  late-industrial 
world  from  which  they  were  trying  to  escape.^^ 

This  was  a  generation  of  increasingly  autonomous  rebels  seeking  both 
individual  authenticity^^  and  collective  togetherness,  a  lonely  crowd  of  dis- 
ruptive individuals  wanting  to  build  what  the  LSE's  Richard  Sennett  calls 
"intimate  society."^^  The  cult  of  the  social,  then,  in  the  Summer  of  Love  was 
what  Harvard  sociologist  Daniel  Bell  described  as  a  "cultural  contradiction 
of  capitalism"  in  which  people's  economic  circumstances  in  society  and  their 
cultural  thinking  about  those  circumstances  were  diametrically  opposed. 
The  more  atomized  and  lonely  people  became,  the  more  separated  from  tra- 
ditional community,  the  more  they  fell  in  love  with  the  idea  of  the  social. 
But  their  definition  of  the  social  was  so  individualized,  so  much  a  reflection 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  103 

of  their  own  discrete  identities  that  their  cult  of  social  authenticity  was  si- 
multaneously a  cult  of  the  authentic  self— thereby  creating,  in  the  memora- 
ble words  of  cultural  critic  Christopher  Lasch,  a  Culture  of  Narcissism  in 
which  the  narcissist  "cannot  live  without  an  admiring  audience." ^^ 

This  irony — between  an  increasingly  individualized  society  and  an  in- 
creasing longing  for  communal  identity — was  recognized  by  Alvin  Toffler, 
whose  1970  best-selling  book,  Future  Shock,  is  an  uncannily  prescient  warn- 
ing about  the  impermanence  of  today's  Web  3.0  age,  with  its  stock  market 
trading  in  individual  reputations  and  its  fast  flowing  streams  of  information. 
"It  is  ironic,"  Toffler  observed,  "that  the  people  who  complain  most  loudly 
that  people  cannot  relate  to  one  another,  or  cannot  communicate  with  each 
other,  are  often  the  very  same  people  who  urge  greater  individuality."^^ 
Thus,  as  Toffler  noted,  postindustrial  man  is  "modular  man,"  able  to  create  a 
diversity  of  "temporary  interpersonal  relationships"  that  precludes  us — in 
contrast  with  our  preindustrial  ancestors — from  a  strong  sense  of  commu- 
nal identity.  "For  just  as  things  and  places  flow  through  our  lives  at  a  faster 
clip,"  Toffler  wrote  in  Future  Shock,  "so,  too,  do  people." 

Unfortunately,  most  of  the  kids  at  the  Monterrey  Pop  Festival  were  too 
busy  with  their  temporary  interpersonal  relationships  to  give  much  thought 
to  the  contradiction  between  their  strong  sense  of  individualism  and  their 
longing  for  community.  "This  is  my  generation,  this  is  my  generation,  baby," 
sang  the  Who  at  Monterey,  the  words  were  from  "My  Generation,"  another 
sixties  anthem.  But  this  was  My  Generation  in  the  same  way  as  social  media 
is  My  Space — a  narcissistic  generation  of  bohemians  all  constructing  their 
own  communities  according  to  their  own  discrete  needs  and  desires.  These 
bohemians  are  the  early  ancestors  of  Dalton  Conley's  intraviduals,  or  Sherry 
Turkic  and  Jonathan  Franzen's  self-absorbed  digital  youth — the  free-floating, 
fragmented  butterflies  of  today's  age  of  foursquare,  Airtime  and  Plancast, 
who  flit  narcissistically  from  networked  community  to  community  and  from 
personalized  online  experience  to  experience  at  will. 


104  ANDREW  KEEN 

Like  the  impossibly  beautiful  and  rich  Madeleine  Elster,  the  Summer  of 
Love  was  simply  too  good  to  be  true.  On  the  one  hand,  the  counterculture 
promoted  the  new  man — a  strongly  individualistic  free  thinker  liberated 
from  the  shackles  of  traditional  community;  on  the  other  hand,  however,  it 
promised  a  return  to  the  communitarian  womb  of  the  preindustrial  village. 
The  chances  of  successfully  synthesizing  this  bohemian  individualism  with 
a  primitive  collectivism  were  about  as  realistic  as  the  plot  of  a  Hitchcock 
movie.  The  Summer  of  Love  couldn't  work.  And,  as  we  all  know,  it  didn't. 

This  is  a  picture  we've  seen  before,  of  course,  not  only  in  the  movies,  but 
also  in  real  life.  The  fashionably  threadbare  youngsters  who  poured  into  San 
Francisco  in  1967  with  One-Dimensional  Man  and  On  the  Road  in  their 
rucksacks  may  have  been  less  impoverished  than  the  threadbare  fortune 
hunters  of  1849,  but  their  libertarian  dreams  about  uniting  all  of  mankind 
in  a  global  love-in  were  just  as  chimerical  as  the  forty-niner's  faith  in  discov- 
ering gold.  And  so  it  was  hardly  surprising  that  the  revolutionary  Summer 
of  Love  experiment  ended  in  discord  rather  than  global  connectivity. 

"Hope  I  die  before  I  get  old,"  sang  the  Who  at  Monterrey,  before  smash- 
ing their  instruments  on  stage  in  a  catharsis  of  adolescent  rage  that  repre- 
sented a  dress  rehearsal  of  how  the  sixties  itself  would  die. 

Many  of  the  "gentle  people"  of  San  Francisco  had  indeed  turned  violent 
and  cynical  by  the  late  sixties,  unhinged  in  part  by  their  unholy  overdose  of 
radical  communitarianism  and  individualism.  As  the  English  documentary 
filmmaker  Adam  Curtis,  argues,  "What  tore  them  apart  was  the  very  thing 
that  was  supposed  to  have  been  banished:  power.  Some  people  were  more 
free  than  others — strong  personalities  dominated  the  weak,  but  the  rules 
didn't  allow  any  organized  opposition  to  the  suppression  because  that  would 
be  politics."^^  The  Manson  family,  thus,  replaced  the  love-in.  Nor  was  it 
purely  coincidental  that,  in  its  homelessness,  hunger,  drug  addiction,  crime 
and  sickness,  the  Haight-Ashbury  of  1969  began  to  look  increasingly  like 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  105 

the  San  Francisco  of  1849 — a  graveyard  lined  with  the  corpses  of  broken 
people  and  dreams. 

But  as  we  know  from  Hitchcock's  Vertigo,  a  corpse  is  never  quite  as  dead 
as  it  looks.  Or  as  Marx  memorably  put  it  in  his  essay  on  the  failed  revolu- 
tions of  1848:  "The  tradition  of  all  the  dead  generations  weighs  like  a  night- 
mare on  the  brain  of  the  living."  The  truth  is  that  the  Summer  of  Love 
generation,  My  Generation,  didn't  really  die  in  1969.  It  just  went  online. 
And  today,  that  vibration  is  all  around  us. 

It  is  called  social  media. 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  SOCIAL 

"Movies  are  naturally  social  things. " 

—  MARK  ZUCKERBERG 


The  Macguffin 

In  a  1939  lecture  at  Columbia  University,  Alfred  Hitchcock  revealed  the 
narrative  trick  behind  his  pictures.  "We  have  a  name  in  the  studio  and  we 
call  it  the  'Macguffin.'  It  is  the  mechanical  element  that  usually  crops  up  in 
any  story.  In  crook  stories  it  is  almost  always  the  necklace  and  in  spy  stories 
it  is  most  always  the  papers." 

Even  though  the  Macguffin  catches  the  viewers'  attention,  it  never  turns 
out  to  be  central  to  the  real  plot  of  the  movie.  As  Hitchcock's  biographer, 
Patrick  McGilligan,  notes,  by  the  end  of  any  Hitchcock  picture,  the  Mac- 
guffin has  "become  an  absurdity — and  deliberately  beside  the  point."^ 

The  mechanical  element  that  crops  up  in  any  story  about  the  Internet  is 
technology.  That's  the  Macguffin  in  this  book.  Of  course,  today's  social  me- 
dia revolution  couldn't  have  happened  without  major  advances  in  tech- 
nology. By  the  early  seventies,  the  electrical  engineers  of  Silicon  Valley  had 
made  two  critical  technological  breakthroughs — the  introduction  of  stan- 
dards for  packet  switching  networks,  and  a  first-generation  microprocessor 
developed  by  Gordon  Moore  and  Robert  Noyce's  Intel  Corporation — that 
enabled  the  large  scale  networking  of  digital  devices.  John  Hagel  and  John 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  107 

Seely  Brown  describe  this  as  the  "Big  Shift"  from  a  centralized  and  hierar- 
chical industrial  economy  to  a  flatter  and  supposedly  more  social  and  egali- 
tarian digital  economy.^  This  Big  Shift  empowered  personal  computers  to 
communicate  with  one  another,  thereby  not  only  marking  the  most  signifi- 
cant development  in  communications  technology  since  Alexander  Graham 
Bell's  invention  of  the  telephone  in  1876,  but  also  laying  down  the  "connec- 
tive tissue  of  society"  heralded  by  contemporary  communitarians  like  Clay 
Shirky  and  Don  Tapscott. 

Yet  these  technological  developments  are  mostly  beside  the  point — at 
least  in  terms  of  uncovering  the  real  history  of  social  media.  You'll  remem- 
ber that  the  New  York  Times  technology  journalist  John  MarkofF  wrote  that 
"perhaps  more  than  any  region,  Silicon  Valley  has  transformed  the  world  in 
the  last  half  century."  But  MarkofF  was  only  half  correct.  Yes,  Silicon  Valley 
has  transformed  the  world  with  its  revolutionary  microprocessors  and  packet 
switching  networks;  but  that  world  has  also  changed  Silicon  Valley,  trans- 
forming it  from  a  twentieth-century  scientific  center  for  the  development  of 
digital  technology  into  the  engine  room  of  the  twenty-first-century  global 
social,  cultural  and  economic  revolution, 

"Technology  affects  character,"  Ross  Douthat,  the  culturally  conserva- 
tive New  York  Times  columnist  argues.^  Perhaps.  More  important,  however, 
character  affects  technology.  As  cultural  historians  of  Silicon  Valley,  such  as 
MarkofF  himself,"^  Stanford  University's  media  historian  Fred  Turner,^  the 
Financial  Times' ]3.mcs  Harkin,^  and  Columbia  University  law  scholar  Tim 
Wu^  have  all  meticulously  documented,  the  birth  and  death  of  the  counter- 
culture was  intimately  interwoven  with  the  origins  of  the  personal  computer 
and  the  worldwide  Web.  Many  of  the  leading  apostles  and  architects  of  digi- 
tal connectivity  and  community — such  as  the  eccentric  network  visionaries 
J.C.R.  Linklider  and  Douglas  Englebart,  Whole  Earth  Catalogue  and  WELL 
founder  Stewart  Brand,  Wired  magazine's  founding  editor  Kevin  Kelly,  Apple 
founders  Steve  Jobs  and  Steve  Wozniak  and  Grateful  Dead  lyricist  and 


108  ANDREW  KEEN 

Electronic  Frontier  Foundation  co-founder  John  Perry  Barlow — were  them- 
selves bohemian  products  of  the  counterculture.  These  pioneers,  whom  Fred 
Turner  calls  "new  communalists,"  imported  the  sixties'  disruptive  libertarian- 
ism,  its  rejection  of  hierarchy  and  authority,  its  infatuation  with  openness, 
transparency  and  personal  authenticity,  and  its  global  communitarianism 
into  the  culture  of  what  has  become  known  as  "cyberspace."  Their  vision  was 
to  unite  all  human  beings  in  a  global  network  linked  by  computers.  "This 
strange  idea,"  Tim  Wu  writes,  "was  the  basis  of  what  we  now  call  the  Internet."^ 

"The  web  is  more  a  social  creation  than  a  technical  one,"  thus  confessed 
Tim  Berners-Lee,  the  original  architect  of  the  Worldwide  Web,  about  the 
Internet's  core  social  purpose.  "I  designed  it  for  a  social  effect — to  help 
people  work  together — and  not  as  a  technical  toy.  The  ultimate  goal  of  the 
Web  is  to  support  and  improve  our  weblike  existence  in  the  world.  We 
clump  into  families,  associations,  and  companies.  We  develop  trust  across 
the  miles  and  distrust  around  the  corner."^ 

It  wasn't  just  serendipity,  therefore,  that  the  Internet's  architecture — 
what  Tim  Wu  calls  its  "network  design"  (which,  he  correctly  observes,  "like 
all  design,  can  be  understood  as  ideology"^^) — happened  to  mirror  the  bo- 
hemian values  of  its  pioneers.  Like  Kerouac's  perennial  outsider  Dean  Mori- 
arty  from  On  the  Road,  the  idea  of  cyberspace — a  global  network  of  human 
beings  connected  by  computer — developed  as  all  edge  and  no  center,  an  in- 
finitely expandable  universe  that  naturally  lent  itself  to  the  restless  individu- 
alism of  the  peripatetic  bohemian  who  regarded  himself  as  a  global  citizen. 
As  such,  it  became  a  way  of  keeping  alive  the  disruptive  spirit  of  the  Summer 
of  Love,  with  its  challenge  to  traditional  corporate  and  cultural  hierarchies. 
"The  purpose  of  personal  computing  would  go  hand  in  glove  with  the  idea 
of  computer  network  communication,"  Tim  Wu  explains.  "Both  were  radi- 
cal technology;  and,  fittingly,  both  grew  out  a  kind  of  counterculture."^^  The 
personal  computer  and  the  Internet,  then,  emerged  as  the  natural  home  of 
the  homeless,  to  the  refugees  of  the  love-in  who  no  longer  had  any  allegiance 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  109 

to  a  physical  community  but  who  had,  through  networked  technology, 
graduated  to  membership  into  a  global  community  of  like-minded  souls. 

"I  live  at  Barlow@eff.org.  That  is  where  I  live.  That  is  my  home,"  ex- 
plained John  Perry  Barlow,  sounding  suspiciously  like  Facebook's  fictional- 
ized Sean  Parker  from  The  Social  Network.  Or,  as  Ester  Dyson,  another  of 
the  Silicon  Valley  hipster  founding  class  put  it,  "Like  the  Net,  my  life  is  de- 
centralized. I  live  on  the  Net."^^ 

Nor  was  it  coincidental  that,  as  the  sixties'  countercultural  elite  entered 
the  American  workforce,  they  reshaped  broader  economic  life  with  both 
their  rebellious  individualism  and  their  romantic  communitarianism.  As 
contemporary  observers  of  all  political  persuasions  have  noted — from  con- 
servative New  York  Times  columnist  David  Brooks  to  liberal  Wall  Street 
Journal  columnist  Thomas  Frank — the  ideal  of  the  outsider,  the  disrupter 
who  challenges  authority,  has  become  one  of  the  most  valuable  economic 
commodities  of  early  twenty-first-century  life.  The  corporate  Man  in  the 
Gray  Flannel  Suit  has  thus  metamorphosized  into  Brooks's  contemporary 
free-floating  bourgeois  bohemian,  the  "Bobo,"^^  skilled  in  the  marketing  and 
sales  of  what  Frank  described  as  a  "hip  consumerism"^"* — a  new  orthodoxy 
of  nonconformity  best  summarized  by  the  1997  Apple  Computer  market- 
ing edict  to  "Think  Different."^^  As  Harvard  Business  School  professor 
Shoshana  Zuboff  notes,  the  post  mass-production  economy  "produced  a  new 
human  mentality — of  a  self-determining  individual.  This  mentality  was  once 
the  unique  precinct  of  the  elite:  the  wealthy,  artists,  poets,  philosophers.  And 
it  became  the  mentality  of  everyone."^*'  Or,  to  requote  NPR  executive  editor 
Dick  Meyer,  "Everyone  is  part  of  a  counterculture  now." 

While  We  Weren't  Paying  Attention, 
tlie  industrial  Age  Just  Ended 

Meanwhile,  the  digital  revolution  has  also  been  both  a  central  cause  and 
effect  of  another  deep  structural  shift  on  the  economic  landscape — the 


110  ANDREW  KEEN 

transition  from  an  industrial  economy  dominated  by  corporate  monoliths 
like  IBM,  Lockheed  and  General  Electric  into  a  much  more  individualized 
economy,  shaped  by  what  Peter  Drucker,  the  influential  twentieth-century 
management  theorist,  defined  as  the  "knowledge"  or  "information"  economy. 
This  revolution  is  of  such  economic  and  social  historical  significance, 
Drucker  believed,  that  it  is  equivalent  to  the  great  industrial  revolutions  of 
the  nineteenth  century. 

"We  cannot  yet  tell  with  certainty  what  the  next  society  and  the  next 
economy  will  look  like.  We  are  still  in  the  throes  of  a  transition  period," 
Drucker  wrote  in  the  spring  of  2001.  "Contrary  to  what  most  everybody 
believes,  however,  this  transition  period  is  remarkably  similar  to  the  two  tran- 
sition periods  that  preceded  it  during  the  19th  century:  the  one  in  the  1830s 
and  1840s,  following  the  invention  of  railroads,  postal  services,  telegraph, 
photography,  limited-liability  business,  and  investment  banking;  and  the  sec- 
ond one,  in  the  1870s  and  1880s,  following  the  invention  of  steel  making; 
electric  light  and  electric  power;  synthetic  organic  chemicals,  sewing  ma- 
chines and  washing  machines;  central  heating;  the  subway;  the  elevator  and 
with  it  apartment  and  office  buildings  and  skyscrapers;  the  telephone  and  type- 
writer and  with  them  the  modern  office;  the  business  corporation  and  com- 
mercial banking."^ '^ 

Drucker  is  describing  the  great  transformation  from  a  trade-based  economy 
of  industrial  production  to  an  economy  dominated  by  the  exchange  of 
information — what  he  describes  as  the  shifi:  in  the  "center  of  gravity"  from 
the  manufacturer  or  the  distributor  to  the  "customer."^^  Tomorrow's  "free 
market,"  Drucker  argues,  "means  flow  of  information  rather  than  trade."^^ 
And  the  key  producers  of  value  in  this  new,  increasingly  digital  information 
economy  of  social  networks  like  Facebook,  Linkedin,  Google  -I-  and  Twitter 
are  what  best-selling  author  Daniel  Pink  calls  the  "free  agent  nation"^^  of 
self-employed  and  autonomous  knowledge  workers.  In  the  most  profound 
socioeconomic  change  of  the  early  twenty-first  century,  the  Organization 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  111 


Man  of  the  large-scale  industrial  firm  has  changed  into  what  Pink  calls  a  new 
"species"  of  knowledge  worker  such  as  @scobleizer  and  @quixotic.  Sloan 
Wilson's  Man  in  the  Gray  Flannel  Suit,  therefore,  has  been  transformed 
into  the  free-floating  self-employed  "knowledge"  or  "information"  worker 
whose  creativity  and  innovation  is  uncannily  suited  to  a  globalized  market- 
place of  incessant  individual  mobility  and  creative  economic  destruction. 

"While  we  weren't  paying  attention,  the  industrial  age  just  ended,"  Seth 
Godin,  one  of  the  knowledge  economy's  most  prescient  observers,  told 
me  when  he  appeared  on  my  Techcrunch.tv  show  in  February  2011.^^  The 
Schumpeterian  innovation  economy  that  Godin  describes  is  a  Darwinian 
struggle  of  survival  between  ever-increasingly  innovative  individuals.  "Aver- 
age is  over,"  Godin  argues  in  Linchpin,  his  2010  self-help  book  on  maintain- 
ing our  "indispensability"  in  this  competitive  reputation  economy.^^  Others 
put  it  even  more  bluntly.  Ignore  Everybody  is  Hugh  MacLeod's  Wall  Street 
Journal  best-selling  manual  on  nonconformity.^^  Gary  Vaynerchuk,  one  of 
social  media's  most  successful  self-promoters  with  over  a  million  followers 
as  @garyvee  on  Twitter,  tells  us  to  Crush  It  if  we  are  to  "cash  in  on  our  pas- 
sion" and  remain  indispensable  in  the  global  creative  economy. ^"^ 

"We've  met  the  market  and  it's  us,"  Daniel  Pink  says  about  this  post- 
industrial  Me-economy — a  working  environment  ideally  suited  to  the  bo- 
hemian  culture  of  an  increasingly  individualized  and  self-promoting  digital 
elite.  Schumpeter's  organizational  "creative  destruction"  of  twentieth-century 
capitalism  has  been  replaced  by  an  increasingly  individualized  struggle  of 
self-invention  and  reinvention.  Borrowing  the  title  of  Reid  Hoffman's  2012 
book,^^  New  York  Times  columnist  Thomas  Friedman  describes  this  world 
as  "The  Start-up  of  You,"  an  economy  in  which  we  are  all  entrepreneurs  in 
perpetual  start-up  mode.^*^  The  winners  in  this  hypercompetitive  twenty- 
first-century  economy  are  the  masters  and  mistresses  of  reinvention — 
globally  powerful  individuals  like  AOL's  editor-in-chief,  Arianna  Huffington 
and  blogging  superstar  Andrew  Sullivan  (respectively  presidents  of  the 


112  ANDREW  KEEN 

Cambridge  and  Oxford  debating  unions) — who  have  successfully  rearchi- 
tected  their  identities  to  suit  every  new  twist  and  turn  in  our  global  culture 
and  politics. 

And  yet,  just  as  in  the  Summer  of  Love,  the  more  atomized  and  com- 
petitive society  has  become,  the  more  the  cult  of  the  social  has  flowered 
amongst  the  faithful.  Kevin  Kelly,  Silicon  Valley's  most  articulate  libertar- 
ian collectivist,  best  summarized  this  in  his  1995  book  Out  ofControIP  in 
which  he  presented  the  Internet  as  a  "post-Fordist  economic  order"  man- 
aged by  the  "hive  mind"  of  a  new,  digitally  connected  social  order.^^ 

John  Perry  Barlow  echoed  Kelly's  transcendental  communitarianism  in 
his  vision  of  the  digital  revolution.  "As  a  result  of  the  opening  of  cyberspace, 
humanity  is  now  undergoing  the  most  profound  transformation  of  its  his- 
tory," the  Grateful  Dead  lyricist  wrote.  "Coming  into  the  Virtual  World,  we 
inhabit  Information.  Indeed,  we  become  Information.  Thought  is  embod- 
ied and  the  Flesh  is  made  Word.  It's  weird  as  hell."^^ 

Such  social-transcendentalism  was  as  weird  as  hell.  Unfortunately, 
however,  Kelly  and  Barlow  weren't  the  only  peddlers  of  this  messianic  ro- 
manticism. Through  the  work  of  thinkers  like  MIT  mathematician  Norbert 
Wiener^^  and  Canadian  new  media  guru  Marshall  McLuhan,  Silicon  Val- 
ley's digital  version  of  the  cult  of  the  social  began  to  attract  a  wider  currency. 
In  particular,  McLuhan's  arguments  from  books  like  Gutenberg  Galaxies 
(1962)  and  Understanding  Media  (1964),  about  cyberspace  uniting  all  of 
mankind  in  a  single  "global  village,"  has  become  one  of  Silicon  Valley's  cen- 
tral beliefs  among  social  network  entrepreneurs  like  Mark  Zuckerberg.  It's 
not  surprising,  therefore,  as  David  Kirkpatrick  notes  in  The  Facebook  Effect, 
that  the  Canadian  new  media  guru  is  a  "favorite"  at  a  company  that,  with  its 
close  to  a  billion  members,  might  be  on  the  brink  of  realizing  the  McLuha- 
nite  vision  of  a  "universal  communications  platform  that  would  unite  the 
planet."^^ 

What  is  most  striking  about  McLuhan's  embrace  of  technology  is  his 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  113 


nostalgic  love-in  with  the  imaginary  past.  Yes,  I  should  have  liked  to  have 
lived  there  then,  McLuhan  is  saying  about  ancient  society,  color,  excitement, 
power,  freedom.  The  end  of  history  for  McLuhan,  like  for  other  digital  com- 
munitarians is,  therefore,  a  return  to  the  distant  past.  Therein  lies  the  value  of 
technology  for  this  new  media  guru.  It's  an  Ur-past  time  machine — one  that 
travels  backward  rather  than  forward. 

As  James  Gleick  notes  in  The  Information,  McLuhan  "hailed  the  new 
electric  age  not  for  its  newness  but  for  its  return  to  the  roots  of  human  cre- 
ativity."^^ He  s^ts  value  of  information  technology  as  "winding  the  tape  back- 
wards" and  drawing  us  back  into  what  he  called  our  "tribal  mesh"  of  a 
premodern  oral  culture. 

The  technological  futurism  of  Marshall  McLuhan  and  disciples  like 
Mark  Zuckerberg  is,  thus,  in  reality,  a  nostalgia  for  a  paradise  lost.  Which  is 
why,  as  Mike  Malone  so  memorably  put  it,  "nostalgia  for  the  future  is  Sili- 
con Valley's  greatest  contribution  to  the  age."^^ 

The  Bowling  Alone  Syndrome 

The  corpse  of  the  Summer  of  Love  has,  therefore,  been  resurrected  as  the 
Internet  with  social  media  emerging  as  the  great  hope  for  romantic  commu- 
nitarians desperate  to  bring  humanity  together  and  rebuild  community  in 
the  twenty-first  century.  Think  of  this  nostalgia  for  the  future  as  the  "Bowl- 
ing Alone  syndrome" — a  reference  to  the  communitarian  theories  of  Har- 
vard University  sociologist  Robert  Putnam,  whose  highly  influential  and 
best-selling  Bowling  Alone  regards  the  digital  network  as  the  solution  to 
what  he  considers  as  the  crisis  of  local  community. 

Writing,  in  2000 — only  a  couple  of  years  after  @quixotic  created  the  first 
social  media  business — Putnam  sees  electronic  media  as  the  twenty-first- 
century  means  of  reinventing  community  engagement.  "Let  us  find  ways  to 
ensure  that  by  2010  Americans  will  spend  less  leisure  time  sitting  passively 
alone  in  front  of  glowing  screens  and  more  time  in  active  connection  with 


114  ANDREW  KEEN 

our  fellow  citizens,"  he  argued  with  communitarian  fervor.  "Let  us  foster 
new  forms  of  electronic  entertainment  and  communication  that  reinforce 
community  engagement  rather  than  forestalling  it."^'^ 

Ten  years  later,  this  Bowling  Alone  syndrome — a  social  utilitarianism 
premised  on  the  idea  that  community  makes  us,  as  individuals,  both  happier 
and  more  prosperous — has  become  almost  as  ubiquitous  as  Facebook,  four- 
square or  Twitter.  A  recent  avalanche  of  kumbaya  books  with  good-vibration 
titles  like  We-Jhink,^'^  The  Wealth  of  Networks,  ^^  Socialnomics,^^  Here  Comes 
Everybody,^^  Open  Leadership, ^^  Six  Pixels  of  Separation, ^^  JVhat's  Mine  Is 
Yours:  How  Collaborative  Consumption  is  Changing  the  Way  We  Live,  We 
First,^^  Generation  We,^'^  Connected,^^  Reality  Is  Broken ^^  The  Mesh:  Why 
the  Future  of  Business  Is  Sharing""^  and  The  Hyper-Social  Organization^^  all 
sing  from  the  same  transformational  song  sheet  about  the  miraculous 
power  of  community. 

This  intellectual  obsession  with  the  social,  an  obsession  with  sharing — 
what  today,  "as  the  arc  of  information  flow  bends  toward  ever  greater  con- 
nectivity,"'^'^ is  fashionably  called  a  "meme"  (but  is,  in  many  ways,  a  virus) — can 
be  seen  across  many  different  academic  disciplines.  The  concepts  of  togeth- 
erness and  sharing  have  acquired  such  religious  significance  that,  in  stark 
contrast  with  the  research  of  Oxford  University's  Baroness  Susan  Green- 
field, some  scientists  are  now  "discovering"  its  centrality  in  the  genetic  make- 
up of  the  human  condition.  One  "neuroeconomist,"  a  certain  Dr.  Paul  Zak 
from  the  California  Institute  of  Technology,  has  supposedly  found  that  so- 
cial networking  activates  the  release  of  "generosity-trust  chemical  in  our 
brains.""^^  Larry  Swanson  and  Richard  Thompson  from  the  University  of 
Southern  California  are  even  "discovering"  that  the  brain  resembles  a  inter- 
connected community — thereby  triggering  the  ridiculous  headline:  "Brain 
works  more  like  internet  than  'top  down'  company." "^^ 

Even  David  Brooks,  the  normally  hardheaded  New  York  Times  colum- 
nist, seems  in  part  to  have  fallen  under  the  spell  of  the  social,  arguing  in  his 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  115 


2011  best-selling  The  Social  Animal:  The  Hidden  Sources  of  Love,  Character 
and  Achievement  that  worldly  success  is  a  result  of  sociability  and  that  soli- 
tariness or  reclusiveness  afflict  only  poorly  parented  or  dysfunctional  people.^^ 
And  yet  Brooks  is  much  too  sober  an  analyst  to  have  drunk  fully  from  the 
social  media  Kool-Aid,  particularly  in  terms  of  the  countercultural  narcis- 
sism that  also  characterizes  the  Facebook  and  Twitter  generation.  "It's  not 
all  about  you,"  Brooks  thus  told  American  graduates  in  a  warning  against 
what  he  called  "the  litany  of  expressive  individualism"  that,  he  says,  "is  still 
the  dominant  note  in  American  culture."^^ 

Meanwhile  Steven  Johnson,  another  hypervisible  super-node  who,  you'll 
remember  approvingly,  described  our  "oversharing  cuture"  in  Time  maga- 
zine as  "a  networked  version  of  the  Truman  Show,"  has  gone  as  far  as  to  ar- 
gue that  the  social  is  somehow  written  into  the  natural  laws  of  the  universe. 
In  Where  Good  Ideas  Come  From:  The  Natural  History  of  Innovation, ^^  his 
2010  communitarian  polemic  cleverly  disguised  as  sober  intellectual  his- 
tory, Johnson  attempts  to  collapse  Charles  Darwin's  biological  theories  of 
life's  origins  with  the  eternal  value  of  the  digital  network.  "A  good  idea  is  a 
network,"^^  he  writes,  claiming  that  our  best  ideas,  like  a  biologically  suc- 
cessful coral  reef,  rely  on  what  he  calls  a  social  "ecosystem" — presumably  the 
same  "human  ecosystem"  that  @quixotic  has  been  building,  designing  and 
improving  since  the  late  nineties.  The  short  history  of  the  Web,  Johnson 
tells  us,  citing  the  examples  of  social  networks  like  Twitter,  foursquare  and 
his  own  hyperlocal  social  new  platform  Outside. In,  "started  as  a  desert,  and 
it  has  been  steadily  transforming  into  a  coral  reef."^'^ 

From  Robert  Putnam  to  Steven  Johnson  to  Clay  Shirky  to  JefFjarvis  to 
Kevin  Kelly,  the  message  about  the  core  value  of  the  social  network  re- 
mains the  same.  The  network  is  our  salvation  as  a  human  race,  their  meme 
says.  Digital  social  networks  are  enabling  us  to  come  together  as  a  human 
race,  the  faithful  explain,  a  collectivist  vision  that  a  skeptical  Jaron  Lanier, 
the  inventor  of  virtual  reality,  has  critiqued  as  "digital  Maoism."^^  The 


116  ANDREW  KEEN 

network  will  finally  enable  us  to  realize  ourselves  both  as  individuals  and  as 
social  beings,  these  digital  communitarians  promise.  Business,  leadership, 
media,  identity,  culture,  wealth,  freedom,  innovation,  motivation,  the  brain, 
even,  perhaps  the  universe  itself — everything,  they  say,  is  transformed  by 
the  digital  revolution.  The  future,  they  all  echo  Biz  Stone,  will  inevitably  be 
social. 

The  Long  March  Back  into  the  Future 

"This  will  be  a  long  march,"  John  Hagel  and  John  Seeley  Brown  argue  about 
the  transition  to  a  social  knowledge  economy,  in  a  presumably  unintentio- 
nal nod  to  old  Chairman  Mao.  "For  the  first  time  ever,  we  have  the  real  op- 
portunity to  become  who  we  are  and,  more  importantly,  who  were  meant 
tobe."56 

According  to  Jeff  Jarvis,  this  is  a  long  march  into  the  future  that  might 
lead  us  back  to  the  sixteenth  century  and  what  he  calls  the  "idyllic"  and 
"transparent  society"  of  Henry  VIII's  England.  But  Jarvis's  Utopian  version 
of  early  modern  European  society  is  based  upon  a  fatal  misunderstanding  of 
a  classic  dystopian  text.  "In  1516,  Sir  Thomas  More  argued  in  his  novel  Uto- 
pia that  the  idyllic  society  is  the  transparent  society,"  he  argues  with  charac- 
teristic communitarian  nostalgia  in  Public  Parts.  "In  More's  time,  everyone 
worked  under  the  gaze  of  everyone  else.  Public  business  was  conducted  out 
of  private  homes;  the  cobbler  made  his  shoes  there,  the  alehouse  was  a  house. 
Privacy  in  the  modern  sense  was  not  expected."^'^  Yet  Jarvis  fundamentally 
misreads  Sir  Thomas  More's  Utopia — a  book  that  imagines  a  society  of  such 
radical  transparency  that  the  entire  community  dines  collectively  at  long 
wooden  tables.  Jarvis  fails  to  understand  that,  in  this  classic  defense  of  indi- 
vidual liberty  and  privacy.  More — who  was  hung,  drawn  and  quartered  in 
1535  for  high  treason — was  actually  offering  a  dystopian  warning  about  work- 
ing "under  the  gaze"  of  an  all-seeing  tyrant  like  his  executioner,  Henry  VIII. 

Yet  even  more  than  Jarvis  or  Hagel,  this  Rousseauian  nostalgia  for  an 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  117 

imaginary  preindustrial  community  in  which  we  can  finally  "become  who 
we  are"  and  enable  our  intrinsic  human  nature  is  best  encapsulated  by  uber- 
communitarian  Clay  Shirky,  whose  2010  Cognitive  Surplus''^  picks  up  where 
Putnam's  Bowling  Alone  left  off  ten  years  earlier. 

"The  atomization  of  social  life  in  the  20th  century  left  us  so  far  removed 
from  participatory  culture  that  when  it  came  back,  we  needed  the  phrase 
participatory  culture  to  describe  it,"  Shirky  argues,  articulating  Jean- 
Jacques  Rousseau's  ideal  of  a  citizenry  transparent  to  itself  "Before  the  20th 
century,  we  didn't  really  have  a  phrase  for  participatory  culture;  in  fact,  it 
would  have  been  something  of  a  tautology.  A  significant  chunk  of  culture 
was  participatory — local  gatherings,  events  and  performances — because  where 
else  could  culture  come  from  but  the  people.^^ 

The  digital  revolution  changes  everything,  Shirky  says,  because  "partici- 
patory culture"  does  away  with  the  old  hierarchies  of  twentieth-century  in- 
dustrial media.  We  therefore  no  longer  need  a  well-financed  Hollywood 
studio  like  Paramount  or  an  authoritarian  movie  director  like  Alfred  Hitch- 
cock to  make  Vertigo.  The  twentieth-century  Hollywood  monopoly  of  me- 
dia is  replaced  with  what  Shirky  calls  the  Internet's  "social  production"  in 
which  culture  is  created  by  all  of  us  rather  than  by  elites.  Digital  media  thus 
literally  becomes  the  "connective  tissue  of  society,"  the  participatory  source 
of  both  culture  and  community.  To  requote  John  Perry  Barlow,  we  thus  all 
become  Information — each  of  us  a  participatory  node  in  this  collective  pro- 
duction of  culture. 

But  Shirky — not  for  nothing  dubbed  the  Herbert  Marcuse  of  today's 
Web  intelligentsia^^ — is  right  for  all  the  wrong  reasons.  In  the  twentieth 
century,  we  went  to  the  theater  to  be  terrorized  by  Hitchcock's  pictures 
about  innocent  men  like  Scottie  Ferguson  who  were  dragged  into  night- 
mares they  neither  understood  nor  controlled.  But  when  the  lights  came 
on,  the  nightmare  ended  and  we  were  free  to  leave  the  movie  theater  and 
get  on  with  our  regular  lives. 


118  ANDREW  KEEN 

Today,  however,  Hitchcock's  Vertigo  has  been  radically  democratized  so 
that  we  are  all  now  participants  in  the  drama.  That's  the  truth  about  Shirky's 
"participatory  culture."  You  see,  social  media  has  been  so  ubiquitous,  so  much 
the  connective  tissue  of  society  that  we've  all  become  like  Scottie  Ferguson, 
victims  of  a  creepy  story  that  we  neither  understand  nor  control. 

Yes,  this  digital  version  of  Vertigo  is  as  weird  as  hell. 

Just  as  Gavin  Elster  idealized  an  invented  San  Francisco  of  June  1849 
and  Scottie  Ferguson  fell  in  love  with  the  fake  Madeleine  Elster,  Shirky 
and  his  fellow  communitarians  have  fallen  in  love  with  a  preindustrial 
participatory  culture  that  probably  never  really  existed  and  certainly  can't 
be  resurrected  in  our  highly  competitive  and  increasingly  individualized 
twenty-first-century  world.  And  just  as  Elster  enticed  his  own  old  Stanford 
University  classmate  into  a  dark  fantasy  of  deceit  and  heartbreak,  these  ro- 
mantic communitarians  are,  for  one  reason  or  another,  dragging  all  of  us 
into  a  future  that  most  of  us  really  don't  want — a  digital  love-in  of  default 
publicness,  a  Darwinian  struggle  of  hypervisibly  networked  individuals,  a 
"global  village"  where  secrecy  and  forgetting  are  disappearing,  a  "participa- 
tory culture"  that  shines  an  unwanted  transparency  upon  all  of  our  lives,  a 
Creepy  SnoopOn.Me  world  of  incessant  foursquare  check-ins,  computers 
that  know  us  and  Facebook  facial  scans  in  which  nobody  is  ever  let  alone. 

"While  Steven  Johnson  favorably  compares  the  Internet's  "ecosystem"  to 
one  of  Charles  Darwin's  biologically  teeming  coral  reef,  while  Nicholas 
Christakis  and  James  Fowler  promise  us  that  "when  you  smile,  the  world 
smiles  with  you,^^  while  Jeff  Jarvis  offers  us  a  return  ticket  to  the  "idyllic" 
transparency  of  Henry  VIII's  England,"  and  while  Clay  Shirky  guarantees 
that  "humans  intrinsically  value  a  sense  of  connectedness,"^^  what  networked 
technology  has  really  engineered  is  the  resurrection  of  Jeremy  Bentham's 
Auto-Icon — a  self-glorification  machine  promising,  with  all  the  seductive- 
ness of  a  coercive  Hitchcock  heroine,  to  make  us  all  immortal. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  119 

The  Internet — with  its  virtual  worlds  like  Second  Life — has  transformed 
the  idea  of  immortality  from  a  religious  metaphor  into  a  digital  possibility. 
According  to  the  University  of  Pennsylvania  historian  John  Tresch,  today's 
social  media  system  encourages  all  of  us  to  manage  what  he  calls  our  "fame 
machine"  so  that  we  can  transform  ourselves  into  icons.  In  this  life  in  the 
crystal  palaces  of  our  digital  age,  "We  must  all  now  pass  through  a  mobile, 
multifaceted,  and  omnipresent  fame  machine  to  enter  even  the  modest  are- 
nas of  friendship,  family,  and  work."  And  the  goal  is  to  build  followers  and 
establish  what  Tresch  calls  our  "own  cloud  of  glory."^'^ 

So,  like  Hitchcock's  Vertigo,  social  media — with  its  claim  that  technol- 
ogy unites  us — is  the  exact  reverse  of  what  it  seems.  Behind  the  commu- 
nitarian optimism  of  the  digital  utilitarians  lies  a  vertiginous  and  socially 
fragmented  twenty-first-century  truth.  It's  a  postindustrial  truth  of  increas- 
ingly weak  community  and  a  rampant  individualism  of  super-nodes  and 
super-connectors.  It's  the  truth  of  an  "attention"  economy  that  uses  indi- 
vidual "reputation"  as  its  major  currency  on  networks  like  Klout.  And,  most 
troubling  of  all,  it's  the  antisocial  truth  of  a  socioeconomic  world  of  increas- 
ing loneliness,  isolation  and  inequality — a  socially  dysfunctional  condition 
that  Sherry  Turkic  describes  as  being  "alone  together." 

Just  as  in  a  good  Hitchcock  picture,  everything  is  illusionary.  Those  ac- 
cidental Maoists,  John  Seely  Brown  and  John  Hagel,  were  right  about  their 
"long  march."  But  it's  a  long  march  back  into  the  past  rather  than  the  future. 
History  repeats  itself,  first  as  tragedy,  then  as  farce,  Marx  wrote  in  his  essay 
about  the  failure  of  the  1848  revolution.  Perhaps.  But  there  is  no  doubt 
that — as  Silicon  Valley's  technology  transforms  the  twenty-first-century 
world — the  story  of  the  nineteenth-century  industrial  revolution  is,  in  some 
ways,  being  played  over  again  in  today's  digital  revolution.  The  social  tyr- 
anny that  is  encroaching  upon  individual  liberty  in  today's  hypervisible  age, 
for  example,  is  a  familiar  problem  from  the  mass  mechanical  epoch.  And  so 


120  ANDREW  KEEN 

is  the  Utopian  promise  that  contemporary  technology  can  overcome  the  di- 
visions in  mankind  and  unify  all  of  us  in  a  global  village  of  mutual  under- 
standing and  sympathy. 

So  let's  take  that  long  march  into  the  past  and  return  from  our  culture  of 
great  exhibitionism  to  the  nineteenth-century  age  of  the  great  exhibition. 
And  we  will  begin  this  journey  in  the  haunted  old  university  city  of  Oxford, 
where  we'll  find  a  series  of  pictures  so  faded  from  the  walls  of  history  that,  in 
contrast  to  Hitchcock's  Vertigo,  none  of  you  will  have  ever  seen  any  of  them 
before. 


6 


THE  AGE  OF  THE  GREAT  EXHIBITION 

"The  transparency  is  too  good  to  be  true. . . .  What  lies  behind 
this  falsely  transparent  world?" 

—JEAN   BAUDRILLARD' 


The  Holy  Grail 

The  architects  of  our  public  future  had,  in  the  fading  Ught  of  an  Oxford  au- 
tumn evening,  stepped  back  into  the  private  architecture  of  the  past.  The 
lozenge-shaped,  decagonal  library,  built  in  1853  by  Benjamin  Woodward — an 
Irish  architect  described  by  his  friend,  the  Pre-Raphaelite  artist  Dante  Ga- 
briel Rossetti,  as  "the  silliest  creature  that  ever  breathed  out  of  an  oyster,"'^ 
had  become  the  stage  for  the  architects  of  our  brave  new  hypervisible  world. 
Dotted  around  Woodward's  gothic  Oxford  library,  with  its  infinite  book- 
shelves and  half-invisible  murals  of  scenes  from  King  Arthur's  court  on 
seven  of  its  ten  dark  walls,  were  the  senior  lieutenants,  the  great  knights  of 
today's  global  social  network. 

Silicon  Valley,  you  see,  had  come  to  Oxford.  The  Californian  designers 
of  today's  age  of  transparency  had  come  to  the  ancient  university  city  of  pri- 
vate cloisters  and  hidden  quadrangles,  locked  doors  and  wrought-iron  gates, 
forbidding  walls  and  crooked  alleyways,  illicit  passages  and  tunneled  vaults. 
These  enablers  of  twenty-first-century  visibility  had  come  to  a  place  that  the 
great  travel  writer  Jan  Morris,  noting  its  fifiiy  acres  of  graveyard,  described  as 
"the  most  haunted  of  cities" — so  haunted,  in  fact,  Morris  explains,  that 


122  ANDREW   KEEN 

Jeremy  Bentham,  the  inventor  of  the  Inspection-House,  who,  in  1760,  came 
up  to  Queens  College  (the  same  college,  as  it  happens,  that  Tim  Berners- 
Lee,  the  inventor  of  The  Worldwide  Web,  attended  two  centuries  later),  was 
in  "perpetual  fear  of  spooks."^  And  Silicon  Valley  had  come  to  the  very 
haunted  heart  of  Oxford,  to  the  Oxford  Student  Union,  Benjamin  Wood- 
ward's eccentrically  ornate  building,  a  graveyard  where  the  reputations  of 
many  aspiring  intellects  had  been  buried  over  the  last  two  centuries. 

From  Bentham  to  Berners-Lee,  "everyone  comes  this  way,  sooner  or 
later,"^  Jan  Morris  writes  about  this  shimmering  yet  half-invisible  city  sit- 
ting, as  she  notes,  in  Middle  England's  "no  man's  land"^  between  London 
and  Birmingham.  So  perhaps  it  was  appropriate  then  that  Silicon  Valley's 
aristocrazia — the  architects  of  the  digital  no-man's-land  in  which  we  are  all 
spending  more  and  more  of  our  social  lives — had  now  come  to  this  ancient 
university  city  to  paint  their  vision  of  our  connected  future. 

Silicon  Valley  had  come  to  Oxford  both  literally  and  as  an  idea,  a  symbol 
of  future  innovation.  It  was  there  physically,  in  the  persons  of  Silicon  Val- 
ley's most  innovative  figures — Reid  Hoffman,  Biz  Stone,  Chris  Sacca,  Mike 
Malone  and  Philip  Rosedale.  But  the  Valley  had  also  come  to  Oxford  in  the 
symbolic  form  of  "Silicon  Valley  Comes  to  Oxford,"  a  two-day  conference 
of  debates  and  speeches,  organized  by  the  university's  Said  Business  School 
and  attended  by  students  wanting  to  see  a  picture  of  our  collaborative  social 
future. 

So  there  they  were,  then,  these  architects  of  our  globally  networked  digi- 
tal society.  Dressed  in  tuxedos,  with  flutes  of  champagne  in  one  hand  and 
smartphones  in  their  other,  Silicon  Valley's  social  media  aristocracy  was  scat- 
tered around  Woodward's  Victorian  library,  socializing  in  both  analog  and 
in  digital  form.  They  were  physically  networking,  mingling  in  small  groups 
(this  crowd  of  super-connectors  had  no  need,  of  course,  for  MingleBird's 
social  introduction  app),  clinking  glasses  in  dark  corners  of  the  library  while 
conspiring  over  the  latest  social  media  merger  or  acquisition;  and  simultane- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  123 

ously,  in  a  parallel  digital  universe,  they  were  using  their  smartphones  to 
electronically  network  with  their  global  followers  and  friends,  networking 
to  burnish  their  already  glowing  virtual  reputations,  networking  on  their 
own  social  networks,  forever  networking. 

Or  there  we  were,  I  should  say,  since  I — as  an  aspiring  super-node 
myself — was  also  there,  networking  with  Philip  Rosedale,  the  creator  of  Sec- 
ond Life,  the  three-dimensional,  transparent  society  designed  as  a  "place  to 
connect"^  for  citizens  of  the  digital  world.  "We're  doing  it  because  we  be- 
lieve increased  transparency  is  the  key  to  a  stable  economy  and  economic 
growth,"  Rosedale  said  of  Second  Life.  "Those  economies  that  have  the  most 
transparency  and  the  most  information  are  the  ones  that  grow  the  fastest."'^ 

The  following  day,  Rosedale  would  debate  with  the  Oxford  professor  of 
neuroscience.  Baroness  Susan  Greenfield,  about  "The  Universe,  The  Brain  and 
Second  Life,"  while  I  would  do  battle  with  @quixotic  on  whether  social  net- 
works were  becoming  the  nation-states  of  the  twenty-first  century.  But  that 
evening,  we  were  both  spectators  to  another,  more  pressing  debate.  We  were 
all  about  to  go  downstairs  from  the  library  to  the  Union's  debating  chamber, 
the  place  where  some  of  the  most  powerful  men  and  women  of  the  last  two 
centuries — from  Winston  Churchill  and  Margaret  Thatcher  to  Ronald 
Reagan,  Albert  Einstein  and  Malcolm  X — had  come  to  debate  the  most  im- 
portant issues  in  modern  history. 

Over  the  last  hundred  and  fifi;y  years,  the  Union  has  also  been  the  stage 
on  which  Oxford  undergraduates,  Pareto's  2iS^\i\n^aristocrdzia,  have  estab- 
lished their  intellectual  reputations  by  debating  the  great  questions  of  the 
age.  Previous  student  presidents  of  the  Union  include  British  Prime  Minis- 
ters Edward  Heath  and  Herbert  Asquith,  the  assassinated  Pakistani  prime 
minister  Benazir  Bhutto,  the  current  mayor  of  London  Boris  Johnson  and 
that  master  of  reinvention  Andrew  Sullivan,  one  of  the  most  hypervisible 
brands  in  today's  social  media  world.  Even  Bertie — Queen  Victoria  and 
Prince  Albert's  eldest  son,  the  longtime  Prince  of  Wales  and  the  future 


124  ANDREW  KEEN 

Edward  VII,  who  came  up  to  Christ  Church  as  an  undergraduate  in  1859, 
would  visit  the  Oxford  Union  every  Thursday  to  listen  to  the  debates. 
"Compared  with  the  rest  of  his  Ufe  there,"  one  historian  of  the  Union  com- 
mented on  the  adventures  of  the  unschoiarly  Bertie  at  Oxford,  "it  was  a 
positively  thrilling  experience."^ 

''This  house  believes  that  the  problems  of  tomorrow  are  bigger  than  the  en- 
trepreneurs of  today, "i\it  Oxford  Union  was  about  to  debate.  On  one  side  of 
this  debate  were  the  risk  takers  of  today — Biz  Stone  and  Reid  Hoffman,  en- 
trepreneurs skilled  at  jumping  off  cliffs  and  assembling  airplanes  on  their 
way  down.  On  the  other  were  skeptics  such  as  World  Bank  vice-chairman 
Ian  Goldin  and  the  writer  Will  Hutton,  who  were  doubtful  that  "failing 
fast"  was  a  solution  to  the  social  problems  of  the  twenty-first  century.  It  was 
a  debate  about  whether  the  entrepreneurs  of  Silicon  Valley,  the  architects 
shaping  today's  Web  3.0  revolution,  could  be  trusted  with  our  future  in  a 
digitalized  world  where  the  boundaries  between  first  and  Second  Life  were 
quickly  dissolving. 

As  we  stood  together  drinking  champagne  in  the  fading  light  of  the  Ox- 
ford evening,  Rosedale — a  bronzed  Southern  Californian  whose  athletic  phy- 
sique seemed  more  suited  to  the  well  lit  Utopia  of  Second  Life  than  to  a  darkly 
gothic  nineteenth-century  Oxford  library — and  I  warmed  up  for  the  Union 
debate  with  a  little  intellectual  joust  of  our  own.  We  were  comparing  the  mer- 
its of  Benjamin  Woodward's  nineteenth-century  physical  building  with  the 
transparent  architecture  of  the  twenty-first-century  virtual  network. 

"So  how  does  being  here  contrast  to  being  on  the  Internet?"  I  asked  him, 
sweeping  my  half  empty  champagne  flute  around  the  library.  "Which  expe- 
rience, do  you  think,  is  more  memorable?" 

Rosedale  gazed  up  at  the  paintings  of  King  Arthur's  court  on  the  library 
walls.  In  the  artificial  light  of  the  Gothic  library,  the  tuxedoed  Californian 
technologist,  his  bronzed  face  tilted  toward  the  heavens,  emanated  an  exag- 
gerated presence,  as  if  a  brilliant  force,  some  alternative  light,  was  publicly 


i 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  125 

illuminating  him.  Bathed  in  light  and  color,  this  twenty-first-century  archi- 
tect of  virtual  reality  seemed  superimposed  on  the  gothic  library.  He  ap- 
peared as  a  picture  of  the  future,  hypervisible,  not  unlike  the  way  in  which 
the  avatars  in  his  Second  Life  online  network  stand  out  from  its  three- 
dimensional  canvas. 

I  also  looked  up  to  the  pictures  on  the  walls  of  the  library,  pictures 
that  appeared  to  be  a  replacement  for  windows  in  Woodward's  dark  gothic 
building.  But  not  only  were  these  windows  glassless,  they  were  also  opaque. 
In  contrast,  you  see,  with  the  hypervisible  Rosedale,  these  seven  paintings  of 
King  Arthur's  court — frescoes  that  included  King  Arthur  with  his  knights 
of  the  Round  Table,  the  heroic  deaths  of  Merlin  and  Arthur,  and  Sir  Lance- 
lot's vision  of  the  Holy  Grail — were  barely  observable  with  the  naked  eye, 
offering  only  the  most  elliptical  glimpses  of  washed-out  color  and  faded  im- 
ages. This  was  a  great  exhibition  that  nobody — neither  Philip  Rosedale,  nor 
I,  nor  anyone  else — could  see. 

"There  must've  been  a  technical  glitch,"  Rosedale  joked.  "What  operat- 
ing system  are  they  using  on  the  walls  here?" 

Social  Art 

But  it  was  no  laughing  matter.  There  really  had  been  a  technical  problem 
with  the  walls.  Painted  by  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  and  a  group  of  Pre- 
Raphaelite  Brotherhood  friends^  including  William  Morris  and  Edward 
Burne  Jones,  just  as  Oxford  itself  was  being  radically  transformed  by  what 
Peter  Drucker  called  the  "first  great  industrial  revolution  of  the  1830's  and 
1840's"  (the  railway,  the  most  literal  manifestation  of  the  industrial  network, 
only  reaching  the  university  city  in  1844),  these  romantically  revolutionary 
artists  had  brought  King  Arthur's  mythological  court  back  to  life  in  seven 
frescoes  painted  between  1857  and  1859.'° 

From  the  beginning,  it  had  been  a  self-consciously  amateurish  enterprise 
by  a  group  of  brilliantly  talented  yet  disorganized  Oxford  undergraduates. 


126  ANDREW  KEEN 


In  keeping  with  its  identity  as  what  the  historian  Paul  Johnson  calls  the 
"first  avant-garde  movement  in  art,"^^  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood  proj- 
ect to  paint  the  Union  library  was  a  social  art  experiment.  Having  observed 
that  the  walls  of  Woodward's  decagonal  room  were  "hungry  for  pictures,"^^ 
Rossetti  called  on  a  group  of  his  undergraduate  friends  to  paint  the  walls 
with  scenes  from  Alfred  Tennyson's  1845  Idylls  of  the  King — an  epic  poem 
that  idealized  the  chivalrous  age  of  King  Arthur  and  his  court. 

Yes,  I  should  have  liked  to  have  lived  there  then — color,  excitement,  power, 
freedom,  Tennyson's  1845  poem  about  the  preindustrial  world  says.  And  in  a 
mid-nineteenth-century  society  where  the  new  industrial  network  was  sav- 
agely transforming  all  the  certainties  of  traditional  communal  life,  it  was  no 
wonder  that  Idylls  oftheKing\v3i6i  such  an  impact  on  romantics  like  Rossetti 
and  his  Oxford  friends. 

Despite  their  yearning  for  the  past,  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood's 
attitude  toward  modern  technology  was  curiously  ambivalent.  On  the  one 
hand,  influenced  by  the  gothic  romanticism  of  mid-nineteenth-century  po- 
ets and  writers  like  Tennyson,  Thomas  Carlyle  and  William  Wordsworth, 
the  Pre-Raphaelites  were  critical  of  the  heartlessly  individualistic  na- 
ture of  the  industrial  revolution  and  nostalgic  for  what  the  art  historian  E. 
H.  Gombrich  calls  the  "spirit  of  the  Middle  Ages."^^  As  the  historian  of 
Victorian  England,  A.  N.  Wilson  notes,  "these  young  painters  set  out  to 
criticize  the  spirit  of  the  age"  and  to  "revivify  society"  with  their  gothic  art.^'^ 
But  their  nostalgia  for  the  simple  community  of  the  Middle  Ages — not  un- 
like Marshall  McLuhan's  idealization  of  the  oral  culture  of  primitive  man, 
or  Clay  Shirky's  and  Robert  Putnam's  romanticized  versions  of  participatory 
democracy  in  pre-twentieth-century  communal  life — was  an  invention  that 
bore  little,  if  any,  actual  truth  to  the  past.  This  retreat  into  an  idealized  pic- 
ture of  the  past  that  was,  as  Laurence  des  Cars  notes  in  his  study  of  the 
Pre-Raphaelites,  "a  way  of  replacing  the  realities  of  modern  life  with  ro- 
mance and  chivalry." ^^ 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  127 

But  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood  also  had  a  certain  sort  of  belief, 
perhaps  even  a  McLuhanite  religious  faith  in  the  power  of  technology  to 
help  them  accurately  represent  the  world  and  make  their  creative  work  ac- 
cessible to  their  audience.  According  to  Robert  Hughes,  the  "bywords"  of 
their  revolutionary  art  were  to  ''purge,  simplify,  archaize"^^  the  decay  of 
western  art  and  return  to  a  time  before  the  sixteenth-century  Renaissance 
artist  Raphael  to  rediscover  the  purity  of  representative  painting.  For  the 
Pre-Raphaelites,  "God  was  in  the  details"  of  their  art  and  thus  they  found 
what  Hughes  called  the  "technical  fiction"  of  "painting  with  transparent 
colors  on  a  wet  white  ground "^^  and  to  mix  pigments  with  resinous  varnish 
to  keep  their  colors  fresh"^^ — techniques  which  enabled  them  to  exaggerate 
the  impact  of  light  and  color  and  "to  reproduce  the  dazzle  of  direct  sun- 
light"^^  in  their  paintings.  The  Pre-Raphaelites  thus  relied  on  the  most  in- 
novative modern  technology  to  paint  pictures  which  romanticized  a  past 
that  could  never  and  has  never  existed.  Perhaps  it  wasn't  coincidental,  then, 
that  the  most  brilliant  of  the  frescoes  was  Rossetti's  version  of  Sir  Lancelot's 
Vision  of  the  Holy  Grail,  that  perennial  symbol  in  western  iconography — 
from  Sir  Thomas  More  to  Sir  Thomas  Mallory  to  Alfred  Tennyson  to  Philip 
Rosedale — of  the  perfectly  impossible  and  the  impossibly  perfect  thing. 

At  first,  the  Pre-Raphaelite  social  art  project  on  the  walls  of  Woodward's 
Union  building  was  seen  as  a  triumph,  a  magnificent  representation  of  Ten- 
nyson's poem.  "Never  in  the  long  history  of  Oxford  had  such  groupings  and 
individualities,  forgathered  to  concentrate  devotion  on  a  common  task," 
wrote  one  historian  of  the  Oxford  Union. ^^  As  Jan  Morris  notes,  it  is  the 
"most  famous  Pre-Raphaelite  project  in  Oxford."^*  John  Ruskin,  the  most  in- 
fluential art  critic  of  the  Victorian  era,  considered  Rossetti's  own  picture  of 
Sir  Lancelot's  Vision  of  the  Holy  Grail  to  have  been  "the  finest  piece  of  colour 
in  the  world,"  while  one  contemporary  described  the  colors  as  "so  brilliant  as 
to  make  the  walls  look  like  the  margin  of  an  illuminated  manuscript."  ^^ 

And  yet  open-source  art,  like  open-source  books,  movies  or  revolutions, 


128  ANDREW  KEEN 

doesn't  work — not  now,  not  in  the  future  and  certainly  not  in  the  middle  of 
the  industrial  nineteenth  century.  You  see,  for  all  Rossetti  and  his  young 
friends'  enthusiasm  for  their  collective  art  project,  it  was  an  underfinanced 
and  disorganized  initiative  lacking  any  coherent  leadership  or  overall  plan. 
Their  greatest  mistake — particularly  ironic  given  the  Pre-Raphaelite  reli- 
ance on  technology  to  exaggerate  the  visibility  of  their  pictures — was  failing 
to  provide  the  necessary  technical  preparation  to  protect  the  paint  from  de- 
generation. 

By  1858,  it  was  clear  that  the  frescoes  were  quickly  fading  from  the 
walls  and  were  on  the  verge  of  disappearing.  "The  only  remedy  for  all  is  now 
whitewash,  and  I  shall  be  happy  to  hear  of  its  application,"  Dante  Gabriel 
Rossetti  said  that  year,  having  lost  all  interest  in  the  project.  ^^  Thus,  for  the 
last  century  and  a  half,  these  Pre-Raphaelite  frescoes  have  haunted  the  walls 
of  the  Union  library,  gradually  becoming  less  and  less  decipherable  (in  spite 
of  various  expensive  restoration  projects),^'*  their  fame  resting  upon  their  il- 
legibility. 

But  Second  Life's  Philip  Rosedale  knew  none  of  this.  All  he  could  see 
were  illegible  pictures  and  walls  that  had  forgotten  their  art.  In  the  mind  of 
this  pioneer  of  transparency,  the  walls  had  suffered  a  technical  glitch.  They 
had  failed  to  back  up  their  information.  Their  operating  system  was  faulty. 

"So  this  proves  my  case,"  he  said.  "While  the  Internet  remembers  every- 
thing that  we  enter  into  it,  this  old  library  only  knows  how  to  forget." 

"But  what's  the  value  of  remembering  everything?"  I  asked,  smiling  weakly. 

Rosedale  smiled,  too.  But  his  was  a  blinding  smile,  overflowing  with  Pre- 
Raphaelite  color.  "Remembering  everything  brings  us  all  together,"  he  told 
me.  "It  enables  the  unity  of  mankind." 

''The  unity  of  man?"  \  raised  my  champagne  flute  in  mock  tribute.  "I've 
heard  that  one  before.  History  repeats  itself,  eh?" 

Rosedale  raised  his  champagne  flute,  too.  "Oh  no,  not  this  time,"  he  said, 
clinking  my  flute  with  his.  "This  time  it  will  be  different." 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  129 

But  Rosedale  was  wrong.  This  time  it  won't  be  any  different.  You  see,  a 
holy  grail  is  a  holy  grail,  whether  it's  a  Pre-Raphaelite  social  art  project,  a 
transparent  three-dimensional  world  inhabited  by  avatars,  or  a  global  social 
network  that  brings  humanity  together.  The  unity  of  man  is  as  much  a  delu- 
sion now,  in  our  age  of  great  exhibitionism,  as  it  was  in  the  mid-nineteenth- 
century  during  the  age  of  the  great  exhibition. 

No,  this  time  it  won't  be  different.  And  to  explain  why,  let  me  tell  you  the 
sad  story  of  a  good  prince  from  a  fairy-tale  kingdom  whose  noble  ambition 
was  to  establish  this  unity  of  man. 

The  Unity  of  Mankind 

In  the  early  spring  of  1850,  three  years  before  the  Irish  architect  Benjamin 
Woodward  began  work  on  his  gothic  Oxford  Union  with  its  opaque  win- 
dows onto  an  imaginary  world,  a  good  German  prince  from  the  fairy-tale 
kingdom  of  Saxe-Cobergand  Gotha  named  Francis  Albert  Augustus  Charles 
Emmanuel  gave  a  speech  about  a  much  more  transparent  building.  On  March 
21,  1850,  this  richly  networked  aristocrat — best  known  today  as  Prince  Al- 
bert, the  husband  of  Queen  Victoria,  and  the  father  of  Bertie,  the  Oxford 
undergraduate  who  would  later  become  King  Edward  VII — spoke  in  Lon- 
don to  two  hundred  of  England's  most  powerful  aristocrazia,  the  architects 
of  the  country's  industrial  revolution.  His  Royal  Highness  Prince  Albert 
had  a  big  idea.  Like  Philip  Rosedale,  he  wanted  to  enable  the  unity  of  man 
by  bringing  everyone  in  the  world  together.  And,  like  the  Second  Life  founder, 
he  planned  to  do  this  by  creating  something  of  crystalline  transparency. 

The  speech  was  given  in  the  Egypt  Room  of  Mansion  House,  the  formal 
residence  of  London's  mayor,  an  eighteenth-century  neoclassical  building 
situated  in  the  City  of  London,  then  the  wealthiest  square  mile  in  the  most 
richest  and  most  populous  city  on  earth. ^^  Amongst  the  audience  were  the 
British  prime  minister  Lord  John  Russell,  the  foreign  minister  Lord  Palm- 
erston,  the  former  president  of  the  Oxford  Union  William  Gladstone,  the 


130  ANDREW  KEEN 


Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  the  French  ambassador,  masters  of  city  guilds, 
and  local  politicians  such  as  Henry  Forbes,  the  mayor  of  Bradford,  the  cen- 
ter of  the  new  global  woolen  industry. 

With  its  massive  neoclassical  columns,  painted  shields  and  imposing 
statue  of  Britannia  at  one  end  of  the  hall,  the  Mansion  House's  palatial  Egyp- 
tian room,  designed  by  the  eighteenth-century  Palladian  architect  George 
Dance  the  Elder,  was  a  suitably  imposing  stage  for  Prince  Albert's  grand  mes- 
sage. After  a  banquet  of  turtle  soup,  eel,  lobster,  mutton,  pigeon,  fruit,  cakes 
and  ices,  Prince  Albert,  who  looked  "resplendent"^^  in  his  uniform  as  Master 
of  Trinity  House  Corporation,  Britain's  lighthouse  authority,  rose  to 
speak. 

"Nobody,  however,  who  has  paid  any  attention  to  the  peculiar  features  of  our 
present  era,  will  doubt  for  a  moment  that  we  are  living  at  a  period  of  most  won- 
derful transition,  which  tends  rapidly  to  accomplish  that  great  end,  to  which,  in- 
deed, all  history  points — the  realisation  of  the  unity  of  mankind"  he  began. 

The  prince  was,  in  a  sense,  correct  about  this  great  historical 
"transition" — although,  as  he  himself  knew,  it  certainly  wasn't  "wonderful" 
for  everyone  who  happened  to  be  living  through  it.  He  was  describing  the 
epochal  shift  between  the  old  fragmented  agricultural  communities  ideal- 
ized by  romantics  like  Alfred  Tennyson  and  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brother- 
hood and  the  new  networked  industrial  architecture  of  railways,  telegraph 
and  electric  lines,  roads  and  factories.  To  requote  the  fictionalized  Sean 
Parker  from  The  Social  Network  movie,  "first  we  lived  on  farms,  then  we 
lived  in  cities."  And  as  Peter  Drucker  has  already  reminded  us,  this  techno- 
logical transformation  from  agricultural  to  industrial  life  is  one  of  the  most 
momentous  social  and  economic  events  in  all  of  human  history,  "In  two 
centuries,"  explains  the  economic  historian  Joel  Mokr,  "daily  life  changed 
more  than  it  had  in  the  7,000  years  before."^'' 

Francis  Albert  Augustus  Charles  Emmanuel  of  Saxe-Coberg  and  Gotha, 
a  scion  of  one  of  the  most  networked  of  ancient  European  dynasties,  was  an 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  131 

internationalist — somebody  who  believed  that  the  technology  of  the  in- 
dustrial revolution  was  transforming  us  from  enemies  into  friends  and 
uniting  us  as  a  human  race  through  mutual  respect,  love,  friendship  and 
trust.  Like  the  technological  upheaval  itself,  not  only  was  this  goal  of  uniting 
humans  through  technology  a  new  idea,  but  even  the  word  "international" 
was  a  relatively  recent  neologism,  having  been  invented  by  our  old  friend, 
Jeremy  Bentham,  in  his  1789  Introduction  to  the  Principles  of  Morals  and 
Legislation}"^ 

Albert's  internationalism  was,  so  to  speak,  manufactured  by  his  faith  in 
industrial  technology.  With  its  mechanical  railways,  steamships,  mass  news- 
papers and  telegraph  lines,  the  industrial  revolution  had  reinvented  the  idea 
of  physical  distance,  transforming  a  once  geographically  splintered  world 
into  a  nascent  McLuhanite  global  village.  What  Albert  called  the  "realisa- 
tion of  the  unity  of  mankind"  could  already  be  seen  a  year  before  his  Man- 
sion House  speech,  in  the  1849  San  Francisco  gold  rush,  that  disastrous 
expedition  to  foreign  shores,  an  industriaF^  event  that  not  only  transported 
a  quarter  of  a  million  argonauts  from  all  over  the  world  to  California  in  un- 
der three  years,  but  also  injected  the  gold  necessary  to  provide  liquidity  into 
the  new  global  economic  system. ^^ 

"The  distances  which  separated  the  different  nations  and  parts  of  the  globe 
are  rapidly  vanishing  before  the  achievements  of  modern  invention,  and  we  can 
traverse  them  with  incredible  ease;  the  languages  of  all  nations  are  known,  and 
their  acquirement  placed  within  the  reach  of  everybody;  thought  is  communi- 
cated with  the  rapidity,  and  even  by  the  power,  of  lightning,"  Vnnct  Albert  con- 
tinued with  his  Mansion  House  speech.  "On  the  other  hand,  the  great  principle 
of  division  of  labour,  which  may  be  called  the  moving  power  of  civilization,  is 
being  extended  to  all  branches  of  science,  industry,  and  art. " 

But  in  spite  of  the  death  of  distance,  Prince  Albert  knew  there  was  some- 
thing else  holding  up  the  realization  of  mankind's  unity.  The  new  technol- 
ogy of  the  industrial  network,  for  all  its  miraculous  destruction  of  distance 


132  ANDREW  KEEN 


and  its  dramatic  increase  in  the  capacity  to  produce  goods,  hadn't  necessarily 
brought  people  together.  Indeed,  even  though  Britain  was  the  most  advanced 
industrial  nation  on  earth  in  1850,^'  it  was  also,  in  many  other  ways,  the  most 
divided.  What  Prince  Albert  called  the  "great  principle  of  division  of  labour" 
had,  in  fact,  resulted  in  an  economic  chasm  not  only  between  Britain  and 
the  rest  of  the  world  but  also  between  the  new  rich,  the  capitalist  architects  of 
the  industrial  production,  and  the  new  poor,  the  new  industrial  working 
class  that  comprised  a  large  proportion  of  London's  one-and-half-million 
inhabitants  in  1850  as  well  as  the  growing  population  of  inmates  locked 
inside  Victorian  Britain's  industrially  designed,  Benthamite  prisons. 

In  the  mid  nineteenth  century,  the  industrial  prison  and  the  industrial 
factory  were  often  indistinguishable.  "Modern  industry  has  converted  the 
little  workshop  of  the  patriarchal  master  into  the  great  factory  of  the  indus- 
trial capitalist.  Masses  of  labourers,  crowded  into  the  factory,  are  organized 
like  soldiers,"  wrote  Karl  Marx  and  Friedrich  Engels  in  their  1848  pamphlet 
The  Communist  Manifesto,  along  with  John  Stuart  Mill's  On  Liberty,  the 
most  influental  political  treatise  of  the  nineteenth  century.  "Not  only  are 
they  slaves  of  the  bourgeois  class,  and  of  the  Bourgeois  State;  they  are  daily 
and  hourly  enslaved  by  the  machine,  by  the  overlooker,  and,  above  all,  by  the 
individual  bourgeois  manufacturer  himself  "^^ 

While  there  is  no  record  that  Prince  Albert  read  the  Communist  Mani- 
festo, he  certainly  was  well  aware  of  the  dreadful  lives  of  the  English  indus- 
trial proletariat,  whom  he  described  as  "that  class  of  our  community  which 
has  most  of  the  toil  and  least  of  the  enjoyments,  of  this  world."^^  Through- 
out 1848,  for  example,  the  year  of  acute  political  tension  in  England,  and  of 
revolutions  throughout  most  of  Europe,  he  pestered  Lord  John  Russell  about 
the  suffering  of  the  workers,  telling  the  British  prime  minister  that  the  gov- 
ernment was  "bound  to  do  what  it  can  to  help  the  working  classes  over  the 
present  moment  of  distress."  The  Irish  potato  famine  and  Chartist  violence 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  133 

of  1848  only  made  a  bad  situation  even  worse.  "It  is  dreadful  to  see  the  suf- 
ferings at  this  moment,"  Prince  Albert — who  was  also  the  president  of  The 
Society  for  Improving  the  Condition  of  the  Labouring  Classes — wrote  that 
year  after  visiting  a  particularly  grim  London  slum.^"* 

The  situation  was  seen  as  being  so  bad  during  the  Chartist  demonstra- 
tions of  April  1848  that  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  the  popular  general  who 
defeated  Napoleon  at  Waterloo  in  1815,  transformed  London  into  a  gigan- 
tic Inspection-House,  teeming  with  police  spies  and  controlled  by  a  massive 
garrison  of  troops.  Wellington,  who  was  enlisted  by  the  prime  minister. 
Lord  John  Russell,  as  a  popular  symbol  of  law  and  order,  barricaded  Blooms- 
bury 's  British  Museum,  sandbagged  the  Bank  of  England,  reinforced  all  of 
London's  penitentiaries  with  heavily  armed  guards  and  mobilized  a  small 
army  of  prying  security  staff,  including  what  A.  N.  Wilson  describes  as  an 
"astonishing"  85,000  special  constables. ^^  Visibility  had,  already,  become  a 
trap.  Indeed,  it  is  likely  that  one  of  these  special  constables  took  the  first- 
ever  photographs  of  a  major  historical  event,  the  earliest  origins  of  contem- 
porary photography  social  networks  like  Instagram,  capturing  daguerreotypes 
of  what  Wilson  describes  as  "drizzly  pathos"  that  were  later  used  by  police 
spies  to  identify  and  imprison  troublemakers. 

There  were  three  ways  of  trying  to  heal  the  international  discord  and 
splintering  of  society  during  the  mid-nineteenth-century  industrial  revolu- 
tion. The  first  was,  like  Marx  and  Engels,  to  become  a  revolutionary  com- 
munist and  try  to  destroy  capitalism  in  order  to  reassemble  humanity  via 
the  holy  grail  of  a  universally  classless,  high-tech  society  in  which  we'd  be 
free  to  "hunt  in  the  morning,  fish  in  the  afternoon  and  rear  cattle  in  the  eve- 
ning."^^  The  second  was  to  retreat,  like  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood  or 
the  anti-industrial  Luddite  movement,  into  a  reactionary  medieval  world, 
an  ur-past  of  organic  community  and  heroically  unselfish  knights — a  strat- 
egy that  transformed  history  into  fairy  tale  pictures.  And  the  third  option 


134  ANDREW  KEEN 

was  to  try  to  reform  the  system  from  within,  healing  over  social  divisions 
and  pursuing  policies  that  seemed  to  unite  rather  than  divide  people. 

Prince  Albert  was  a  reformer  rather  than  a  Utopian  revolutionary  or  reac- 
tionary. And  that  is  what  had  brought  him  to  the  neoclassical  Egyptian 
Room  in  the  early  Spring  of  1850.  He  was  there  to  describe  his  strategy  for 
realizing  the  unity  of  mankind.  "He  [Prince  Albert]  believed  that  the  world 
had  reached  a  stage  where  all  knowledge  and  innovation  were  recognized 
as  being  the  property  of  the  international  community  as  a  whole,  not  some- 
thing that  needed  to  be  protected  by  secrecy  from  the  gaze  of  outsiders,"  one 
historian  observed.^^  Albert  had,  therefore,  come  to  Mansion  House  to  pro- 
mote a  transparent  event  that  would  openly  celebrate  science,  technology 
and  the  laws  of  motion.  This  festival  of  innovation,  with  its  faith  in  open- 
ness and  transparency,  would  bring  the  world  together.  It  was  to  be  called 
the  Great  Exhibition. 

"Science  discovers  these  laws  of  power,  motion,  and  transformation;  indus- 
try applies  them  to  raw  matter,  which  the  earth  yields  us  in  abundance,  hut 
which  becomes  valuable  only  by  knowledge.  Art  teaches  us  the  immutable 
laws  of  beauty  and  symmetry,  and  gives  to  our  productions  forms  in  accordance 
with  them,"  Prince  Albert  explained  to  his  audience  in  the  Egypt  room. 
"Gentlemen — the  Exhibition  of  1851  is  to  give  us  a  true  test  and  a  living  pic- 
ture of  the  point  of  development  at  which  the  whole  of  mankind  has  arrived  in 
this  great  task,  and  a  new  starting  point  from  which  all  nations  will  be  able  to 
direct  their  further  exertions. " 

London's  1851  "Great  Exhibition  of  the  Works  of  Industry  of  all  Na- 
tions," as  it  officially  became  known,  would  indeed  be  a  "true  test"  to  trans- 
form warring  social  classes  and  nations  into  friends  and  realize  the  unity  of 
mankind.  But  this  was  to  be  no  ordinary  exhibition.  You  see.  Prince  Albert, 
himself  a  gifted  amateur  portrait  painter,  had  found  a  revolutionary  archi- 
tect to  construct  a  temple  of  transparency  for  his  Great  Exhibition. 

He  had  found  a  gardener  with  a  genius  for  building  glass  houses. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  135 


The  Crystal  Palace 

Prince  Albert  first  came  across  the  work  of  this  gardener  in  December  1843. 
The  Prince  Consort  and  Queen  Victoria  had  been  visiting  the  Derbyshire 
estate  of  the  Duke  of  Devonshire,  today  best  known  for  Chatsworth  House, 
a  palatial  seventeenth-century  neoclassical  country  house  with  a  panoramic 
view  of  the  surrounding  parks  and  gardens. 

But  at  Chatsworth,  the  view  that  captivated  Queen  Victoria  and 
Prince  Albert  was  of  a  revolutionary  iron-and-glass  conservatory  built  by 
Chatsworth 's  head  gardener,  a  landscape  architect  from  humble  roots 
named  Joseph  Paxton.  Queen  Victoria  described  it  as  "the  finest  thing  imag- 
inable of  its  kind,"  while  Prince  Albert  called  it  "magnificent  and  beauti- 
ful."^« 

Prince  Albert  never  forgot  Joseph  Paxton's  great  iron-and-glass  building 
and,  after  other  architectural  projects  were  deemed  too  expensive,  he  called 
on  Paxton — by  then  a  minister  of  Parliament — to  build  an  industrial  glass 
and  steel  palace  to  house  the  works  of  industry  of  all  nations.  Thus,  as  Bill 
Bryson  notes,  "In  the  autumn  of  1850,  in  Hyde  Park  in  London,  there  arose 
a  most  extraordinary  structure:  a  giant  iron-and-glass  greenhouse  covering 
nineteen  acres  of  ground  and  containing  within  its  airy  vastness  enough 
room  for  four  St.  Paul's  Cathedrals."^^ 

What  Paxton  built  in  Hyde  Park  in  just  five  months  in  1850  was,  ac- 
cording to  Prince  Albert,  "truly  a  piece  of  marvelous  art,"'^^  Bill  Bryson 
describes  it  as  "the  century's  most  daring  and  iconic  building,'"^^  and  Eric 
Hobsbawn  calls  it  a  "brilliant  monument"'*^  for  the  achievements  of  the 
industrial  revolution.  Its  architecture  was  the  opposite  of  Benjamin  Wood- 
ward's dark  Oxford  library.  The  building  was  comprised  of  293,655  panes 
of  glass,  more  than  4,500  tons  of  iron  and,  most  amazingly,  twenty-four 
miles  of  guttering.  The  satirical  magazine  Punch  dubbed  it  "The  Crystal 
Palace"  and  the  name  stuck.  For  his  festival  of  innovation  with  its  goal  of 
eliminating  the  secrecy  of  the  preindustrial  world,  Prince  Albert  had 


136  ANDREW  KEEN 

commissioned  a  transparent  glass  palace  that  would  be  impossible  to  pro- 
tect from  the  gaze  of  outsiders. 

"After  breakfast  we  drove  with  the  5  children  to  look  at  the  Crystal  Pal- 
ace, which  was  not  finished  when  we  last  went,  and  really  now  is  one  of  the 
wonders  of  the  world,  which  we  English  can  be  proud  . . ."  Queen  Victoria 
wrote  in  her  journal  in  February  1850.  "The  galleries  are  finished,  and  from 
the  top  of  them  the  effect  is  quite  wonderful.  The  sun  shining  in  through 
the  transept  gave  a  fairy-like  appearance.  The  building  is  so  light  and  grace- 
ful, in  spite  of  its  immense  size.  Many  of  the  exhibits  have  arrived It  made 

me  feel  proud  and  happy."^^ 

Not  everyone,  of  course,  admired  Paxton's  industrial  miracle  of  iron  and 
glass  with  either  Queen  Victoria's  enthusiasm  or  pride.  The  gothic  skeptics  of 
technology  and  progress  were,  to  say  the  least,  underwhelmed.  The  patron 
saint  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  the  critic  John  Ruskin,  described 
the  Crystal  Palace  as  "a  cucumber  frame  between  two  chimneys,"  while  Ed- 
ward Burne-Jones,  one  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  artists  who  painted  the  walls  of 
the  Oxford  Union,  found  Paxton's  architectural  design  to  be  "cheerless  and 
monotonous.  ^^ 

But  while  the  symbol  of  the  Great  Exhibition  of  1851  was  Paxton's 
transparent  glass  and  iron  palace,  its  social  significance  was  Prince  Al- 
bert's attempt  to  unify  the  human  race  through  a  universal  celebration  of 
technology  and  science.  The  exhibition  showed  off  100,000  items  of 
14,000  firms  from  Britain  and  around  the  world.  It  was  a  cornucopia  of 
industrial  design,  mechanical  technology  and  steam  powered  machines. 
There  were  machines  for  saving  human  labor,  printing  presses  and  steam 
engines,  mechanical  globes,  exhibits  of  the  recently  invented  science  of  pho- 
tography, prototypes  of  submarines  and  industrial  printing  presses,  even 
machines  for  tipping  people  out  of  bed.  Ironically,  the  only  exhibit  miss- 
ing was  Charles  Babbage's  proto-computer,  his  Difference  Engine,  which. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  137 

perhaps  because  of  its  or  his  unimaginable  foreignness,"^^  was  rejected  by 
the  organizers  of  the  exhibition. 

The  engineering  achievements  exhibited  in  the  Crystal  Palace  were 
matched  by  the  Great  Exhibition's  social  engineering  achievements.  As  the 
historian  Benjamin  Friedman  notes,  "the  Great  Exhibition  was  an  exuber- 
ant celebration  of  the  idea  not  just  of  scientific  and  therefore  material  prog- 
ress but ...  of  progress  in  social,  civic  and  moral  affairs  too.'"^^  Prince 
Albert's  grand  goal — to  bring  people  together  and  break  down  the  social 
boundaries  of  nineteenth-century  life — had,  in  many  ways,  been  successful. 
So,  in  spite  of  the  fears  of  socialist  insurrection  that  resulted  in  the  opening 
ceremony  being  a  private  rather  than  public  event,  the  Great  Exhibition  was 
the  first  genuinely  open,  inclusive  event  of  the  nineteenth  century  in  which 
the  English  working  classes  and  the  aristocracy  physically  mingled  together 
as  citizens  of  the  same  nation. 

As  Michael  Leapman  describes  in  The  World  for  a  Shilling:  How  the  Great 
Exhibition  of  1 85 1  Shaped  a  Nation,  his  vivid  narrative  of  how  the  exhibition 
affected  the  lives  of  ordinary  people.  Prince  Albert's  Great  Exhibition  really 
did  contribute  to  the  creation  of  a  collective  British  identity.  Indeed,  after 
its  move  from  Hyde  Park  to  the  South  London  suburb  of  Sydenham  (today 
known  as  Crystal  Palace)  in  1854,  Paxton's  building  was  popularly  known 
as  the  "Palace  of  the  People"^'^  and  attracted  60  million  visitors  over  the  next 
thirty  years.^^ 

In  many  ways  then,  the  Great  Exhibition  was  a  triumph  of  Prince  Al- 
bert's faith  in  nineteenth-century  industrial  technology  to  realize  the  unity 
of  mankind.  But  the  internationalist  Prince  Consort,  who  died  in  1861  at 
the  young  age  of  forty-two,  departed  from  the  historical  stage  at  the  very 
moment  when  all  his  precious  optimism  about  the  industrial  revolution's 
"great  transition"  was  beginning  to  shatter  into  many  pieces.  Rather  than 
the  unifier  of  mankind,  industrial  technology,  it  turned  out,  was  helping  to 


138  ANDREW  KEEN 

disunite  us  into  distrustful  social  classes,  tribes  and  nation-states  at  perpet- 
ual war  with  one  another. 

The  Shattering  of  the  Glass 

On  the  night  of  November  30,  1936,  the  sky  over  London  was  bloodred 
with  500-foot  flames  fanned  from  a  high  northwesterly  wind.  Joseph  Pax- 
ton's  Crystal  Palace,  that  mid-nineteenth-century  hope  for  a  more  transparent 
and  inclusive  industrial  world,  was  ablaze.  In  spite  of  the  efforts  of  hundreds 
of  fire  engines,  firemen,  and  policemen,  Paxton's  palace,  all  293,655  panes  of 
glass,  quickly  dissolved  into  a  heap  of  melted  glass  and  buckled  metal,  the 
victim  of  what  fire  experts  called  the  "funnel  effect"  of  the  high  winds  and 
the  building's  combustible  wooden  floorboards.  A  Daily  Mail  reporter, 
watching  the  fire  from  a  plane,  described  it  as  being  "like  a  blazing  crater  of 
a  volcano."^^  The  fire  was  visible  from  Hampstead  Heath  in  North  London 
to  the  coastal  cities  of  Brighton  and  Margate  in  the  south.  A  half-million 
spectators  watched  the  burning  Crystal  Palace  in  South  London.  And  at 
nine  p.m.  that  evening,  even  ministers  of  Parliament  left  a  Commons  debate 
to  watch  the  fire  from  their  Westminster  committee  rooms  and  terraces. 

They  were  watching  the  burning  down  of  Prince  Albert's  internationalist 
dream.  But,  in  truth,  this  death  was  little  more  than  symbolic,  the  burial  of  a 
corpse  that  had  already  been  dead  for  half  a  century.  "Haughty  with  hope  of 
endless  progress  and  irresistible  power"  had  been  John  Ruskin's  observation 
about  the  Crystal  Palace  when  it  moved  from  Hyde  Park  to  Sydenham  in 
1854.  Ruskin's  warning  about  the  hubris  of  Albert's  faith  in  technology  and 
science  to  bring  us  together  had  been  right.  As  the  nineteenth  century  drew  to 
a  close,  the  Crystal  Palace  struggled  to  establish  what,  in  Silicon  Valley,  would 
be  called  a  viable  business  model.  Paxton's  building  fell  into  disrepair  and 
debt.  By  191 1  it  had  declared  bankruptcy  and  during  World  War  I  this  glass 
and  iron  building  was  renamed  HMS  Crystal  Palace  and,  with  a  savage  irony, 
was  used  as  a  naval  training  station  for  the  Great  War  against  Germany. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  139 


By  1936,  Prince  Albert's  dream  had  not  only  died  in  South  London,  but 
also  throughout  most  of  the  world.  His  faith  in  industrialization  and  the 
belief  that  technology  and  science  would  unite  us  had  proven  to  be  tragi- 
cally misguided.  Yes,  Prince  Albert  was  right  that  the  analog  networks  of 
the  mechanized  age  would  create  new  identities  and  social  organization,  but 
his  dream  of  history's  "wonderful  transition"  turned  out,  in  much  of  the 
world,  to  be  closer  to  a  nightmare. 

As  the  sociologist  Ernest  Gellner  argues  m  Nations  and  Nationalism,  the 
industrial  revolution  resulted  in  an  explosion  of  nationalism  rather  than  in- 
ternationalism. "Work,  in  industrial  society,  does  not  mean  moving  matter. 
The  paradigm  of  work  is  no  longer  ploughing,  reaping,  thrashing,"  Gellner 
argued.  "Work,  in  the  main,  is  no  longer  the  manipulation  of  things,  but  of 
meanings.  It  generally  involves  exchanging  communications  with  other 
people,  or  manipulating  the  controls  of  a  machine."^^ 

This  new  network  of  roads,  railways,  telegraph  wires  and  the  mechanized 
printing  press  did  indeed  provide  the  necessary  architecture  for  this  distri- 
bution of  meaning,  thereby  replacing  the  old  fragmented  agricultural 
worlds  with  a  much  more  physically  connected  society.  But  rather  than 
Esperanto  or  a  universal  computer  code,  the  dominant  languages  of  this 
late-nineteenth-  and  early-twentieth-century  industrial  world  were  exclu- 
sive national  discourses  like  Italian  or  German.  These  languages  and  their 
supposedly  eternal  cultural  traditions  and  histories  imprisoned  us  within 
narrow  linguistic  groups.  Rather  than  creating  the  unity  of  man,  they  led  to 
an  age  of  the  nation-state,  a  new  kind  of  imaginary  community  in  which  we 
defined  ourselves  in  unique  terms  that  not  only  excluded  neighboring  nations 
but  also  cultural  minorities  within  our  own  society. 

Take,  for  example,  the  modern  history  of  Germany.  When  the  good  in- 
ternationalist Prince  Albert  died  in  1861  his  fairy-tale  principality,  Saxe- 
Coberg  and  Gotha,  was  a  part  of  the  South  German  confederation  of  Bavaria. 
In  1870,  Bavaria  joined  Bismarck's  Prussia  in  a  war  against  France  that 


140  ANDREW  KEEN 

culminated  in  the  establishment  of  a  united  Germany  in  1871.  The  history 
of  Germany  between  1871  and  1914  is  dominated,  on  the  one  hand,  by  a 
remarkably  successful  industrial  revolution  and,  on  the  other,  by  the  rise  of 
an  increasingly  assertive  nationalism.  Germany's  defeat  in  World  War  I 
led  to  the  rise  of  National  Socialism  and  the  emergence  of  an  even  more  es- 
chatological  communal  identity,  fused  with  a  cult  of  medieval  valor,  mostly 
directed  against  the  Jews,  those  symbols  of  the  very  modernity  and  interna- 
tionalism that  Prince  Albert  had  once  idealized. 

In  1936,  the  fateful  year  that  the  Crystal  Palace  burnt  to  the  ground,  the 
German  National  Socialists  had  seized  power  and  were  aggressively  de- 
ploying the  latest  technology  and  science  to  rearm  the  country.  In  Ger- 
many, however,  the  bloody  night  of  broken  glass  took  place  a  couple  of 
years  later,  in  November  1938.  The  National  Socialists  organized  Kristall- 
nacht  (literally:  "the  night  of  broken  glass"),  a  modern,  state-sponsored  po- 
grom in  which  mobs  destroyed  the  property  of  German  Jews,  smashing  the 
windows  of  their  homes  and  stores  and  carrying  offa  quarter  of  all  German 
Jewish  men  to  primitive  high-tech  prisons  we  now  call  concentration  camps. 
So  much  glass  was  destroyed  in  forty-eight  hours  of  rioting  that  it  took  two 
full  years'  production  of  the  entire  plate-glass  production  of  Belgium  to  re- 
place it  all.  But  Kristallnacht  was  only  the  beginning  of  the  violence  and 
hatred  against  outsiders.  After  that  came  another  world  war  and  the  indus- 
trial death  camps  of  Auschwitz  and  Belsen,  which  deployed  the  latest  tech- 
nology and  science  in  ways  that  Prince  Albert,  in  his  very  worst  nightmares, 
could  never  have  imagined. 

What  is  most  shocking  about  the  organization  of  the  death  camps  was 
their  corruption  of  those  two  great  pillars  of  Benthamite  utilitarianism:  social 
efficiency  and  central  planning.  "Belsen  is  said  to  have  looked  like  an  atomic 
research  station  or  a  well-designed  motion  picture  studio,"  wrote  Brave  New 
World  author  Aldous  Huxley  in  a  savage  swipe  at  Bentham's  Inspection- 
House.  "The  Bentham  brothers  have  been  dead  these  hundred  years  and  more; 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  141 

but  the  spirit  of  the  panopticon,  the  spirit  of  Sir  Samuel's  mujik-compdiin^ 
workhouse,  had  gone  marching  along  to  strange  and  horrible  destinations."^^ 

Meanwhile,  to  the  east  of  Nazi  Germany,  the  Russian  Empire  had  degen- 
erated from  the  enlightened  despotism  of  Samuel  Bentham's  eighteenth- 
century  sponsor,  Catherine  the  Great,  into  the  twentieth-century  oriental 
despotism  of  Joseph  Stalin.  Here,  in  the  brave  new  collective  world  that  had 
been  Orwell's  dark  muse  for  the  Ministry  of  Truth,  facecrime,  Ownlife  and 
Big  Brother,  technology  and  science  were  being  deployed  in  a  nightmarish 
manner  that  transformed  the  country  into  an  entirely  transparent  "'mujik- 
compelling  workhouse." 

Having  been  articulated  in  the  Utopian  language  of  the  brotherhood  of 
man  and  the  universal  friendship  of  the  working  classes,  the  Soviet  revolu- 
tion had  been  so  corrupted  by  Stalin's  terror  that,  as  Hannah  Arendt  argues 
in  Origins  of  Totalitarianism,  its  true  impact  was  of  individual  isolation  and 
weaker  and  weaker  social  ties.  By  November  1936,  when  the  sky  over  Lon- 
don was  bloodred  with  flames,  Stalin's  version  of  the  great  exhibition,  his 
public  show  trials,  conducted  by  his  so-called  "apparatchik,"  the  functionar- 
ies of  his  brutal  five-year  plans,  were  reaching  their  bloodily  exhibitionistic 
climax. 

What  the  apparat  created  was  a  regime  in  which  the  camera  was  never 
switched  offand  the  peephole  never  slammed  shut.  Even  after  Stalin's  death. 
Big  Brother  remained  in  power.  In  East  Germany,  for  example,  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  citizens  were  recruited  by  Stasi  secret  police  as  spies  to  watch  their 
neighbors.  By  transforming  society  into  a  transparent  prison  that  outlawed 
the  liberty  of  independent  thought,  by  turning  East  Germans  into  a  vertigi- 
nous nation  of  Scottie  Fergusons  looking  at  the  lives  of  others,  the  apparat 
killed  individual  privacy.  As  the  Harvard  University  Law  professor  Charles 
Fried  argues,  privacy  is  intimately  bound  up  with  respect,  love,  friendship 
and  trust,  and  is  the  "oxygen"  by  which  individuals  are  capable  of  building 
social  "relations  of  the  most  fundamental  sort."^^  And  it  was  exactly  this 


142  ANDREW  KEEN 

oxygen  that  the  apparatchik  switched  off — thereby  destroying  the  respect, 
love,  friendship  and  trust  that  traditionally  existed  between  human  beings. 
Thus,  in  the  notorious  Room  101  of  Orwell's  Nineteen  Eighty-four,  what 
the  apparatchik  finally  smashed  was  Winston  Smith's  love  for  Julia,  the 
very  thing  that  made  him  human  and  gave  him  hope  for  the  future. 

That  was  the  real  tragedy  of  totalitarianism.  Instead  of  love,  there  was 
hatred;  in  place  of  friendship,  there  was  individual  isolation  and  mutual 
disrespect,  fear  and  distrust.  Hope  for  the  future  had  been  extinguished  in  a 
society  that  had  become  the  most  hideous  parody  of  Jeremy  Bentham's  hid- 
eously omniscient  Inspection-House  prison. 

The  Return  of  the  Future 

You'll  remember  that  Karl  Marx  wrote  that  history  repeats  itself— first  as 
tragedy,  then  as  farce — while  Reid  Hoffman,  the  co-owner  of  our  future, 
predicted  that  this  future  is  always  sooner  and  stranger  than  we  think.  But 
today,  when  the  dream  of  the  unity  of  man  has  been  resurrected  by  Utopians 
like  Philip  Rosedale,  what  exactly  is  that  collective  future?  Could  the  Inter- 
net really  turn  out  to  be  a  farcical  gulag?  Might  Mark  Zuckerberg's  five-year 
plans  to  transform  the  Internet  into  a  brightly  lit  dorm  room  incarcerate  us 
all  in  an  absurd  global  prison  where  we  are  all  forced  to  live  in  public? 

In  today's  digital  age,  we  know  that  the  Big  Brother  of  industrial  society 
has  been  replaced  by  Walter  Kirn's  "vast  cohort  of  prankish  Little  Brothers" 
equipped  with  their  BlackBerrys,  iPhones  and  Android  fame  machines.^^ 
Thus  it  would  be  not  only  be  wrong,  but  also  rather  silly  to  suggest  that  Mark 
Zuckerbergis  Stalin  2.0,  or — whatever  Julian  Assange  might  claim — that 
Facebook  is  the  new  Stasi. 

In  an  April  2011  debate  on  TechcrunchTV,  Tim  O'Reilly,  the  pubHsh- 
ing  mogul  who  invented  the  term  Web  2.0  and  Reid  Hoffman,  the  archan- 
gel behind  today's  Web  3.0  revolution,  debated  what  we  had  most  to  fear  in 
a  digital  world  overflowing  with  more  and  more  personalized  data.^"^  For 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  143 

O'Reilly,  the  fear  was  all-powerful  corporations,  while  @quixotic's  greatest 
fear  was  government.  But  they  both  missed  a  third  spectre  (and  the  third 
rail  in  a  democracy  like  the  United  States)  that,  in  some  ways,  is  more  chill- 
ing than  either  snooping  government  or  corporations.  O'Reilly  and  Hoff- 
man forgot  about  the  billions  of  little  brothers  who  will,  by  2020,  own  50 
billion  smart  devices  connected  to  the  network.  They  thus  failed  to  ac- 
knowledge that  what  we  most  have  to  fear  in  the  twenty-first  century  might 
be  ourselves. 

"The  seeing  machine  was  once  a  sort  of  dark  room  into  which  individuals 
spied;  it  has  become  a  transparent  building  in  which  the  exercise  of  power 
may  be  supervised  by  society  as  a  whole."  Michel  Foucault  wrote  about  the 
way  in  which  Bentham's  Inspection-House  "spread  throughout  the  social 
body"  in  the  industrial  age.^^  But  Foucault  died  in  1984,  the  fateful  year  that 
Apple  told  us  to  "think  different,"  and  thus  was  never  able  to  see  the  resurrec- 
tion of  the  Inspection-House  as  the  great  tribunal  committee  of  our  new 
digital  world. 

This  shift  in  power  from  a  single  omniscient  twentieth-century  Big 
Brother  to  the  vast  cohort  of  twenty-first-century  Little  Brothers  is  what 
distinguishes  our  future  from  the  age  of  the  great  exhibition.  The  failure  of 
totalitarianism,  the  decline  of  the  role  and  power  of  government  in  most 
democratic  societies  and  today's  general  cynicism  toward  all  forms  of  politi- 
cal authority  is,  as  British  filmmaker  Adam  Curtis  argues,  "the  ideology  of 
our  times."  Yet,  while  power  has  shifiied  from  the  analog  center  to  the  digital 
edge,  away  both  from  evil  dictators  like  Stalin  and  well-intentioned  reform- 
ers like  Prince  Albert,  that  doesn't  mean  that  power  has  been  eliminated  or 
that  we  really  are  about  to  realize  a  new  unity  of  man.  What,  in  fact,  we  see 
when  we  gaze  into  the  future  is  that  all  the  glass  once  used  by  Joseph  Paxton 
to  build  the  Crystal  Palace  has,  in  our  age  of  great  exhibitionism,  been 
transformed  into  billions  of  Auto-Icons. 

What  we  see  in  this  future  are  pictures  so  strange  that  they  could  have 


144  ANDREW  KEEN 

been  created  by  the  author  o^Absurdistan.  We  see  the  return  of  the  apparat- 
chik as  an  omniscient  wireless  device.  We  see  a  society  that  is  becoming  its 
own  electronic  image,  a  (dis)unity  of  little  brothers.  We  see  human  beings 
turned  inside  out,  so  that  all  their  most  intimate  data  is  displayed  in  the  full 
gaze  of  the  public  network.  We  see  a  reputation  economy  in  which  respect, 
love,  friendship  and  trust  are  replacing  cash  as  society's  scarcest  and  thus 
its  most  valuable  commodity.  We  see  a  Super  Sad  True  Love  Story  featuring 
global  super-nodes  with  millions  of  friends  who  don't  know  the  names  of 
their  neighbors.  We  see  digital  vertigo.  More  and  more  digital  vertigo. 

Yes,  these  pictures  from  the  future  are  as  a  weird  as  hell. 

So  imagine  a  world  without  either  secrecy  or  privacy,  where  every- 
thing and  everyone  is  transparent.  Imagine  the  return  of  the  apparatchik 
in  a  world  where  we  all  live  in  public.  Imagine  yesterday's  crystal  palace 
metamorphosing  into  tomorrow's  crystal  prison  where  we  have  incarcer- 
ated ourselves  in  an  infinite  hall  of  mirrors.  And  imagine,  if  you  can,  a 
nineteenth-century  Benthamite  Inspection-House  that  is  simultaneously  a 
twenty-first-century  luxury  hotel.  Because  that  is  exactly  where  we  must  go 
next  to  view  these  haunting  pictures  from  the  future. 


THE  AGE  OF  GREAT  EXHIBITIONISM 

@JetPacks:  What  kind  of  mother  holds  a  press  conference  upon  hearing  of  her 
little  girl's  death?  Is  THIS  your  shot  at  stardom  that  you  can't  pass  up? 


The  Crystal  Prison 

It  was  the  morning  of  my  debate  about  the  future  with  Reid  Hoffman  at 
Oxford.  Later  that  day,  we  would  discuss  whether  social  media  communi- 
ties would  replace  the  nation-state  as  the  source  of  personal  identity  in  the 
twenty-first  century.  But,  for  the  moment,  I  was  standing  in  the  center  of 
what  appeared,  at  first  glance  at  least,  to  be  an  industrial  prison.  The  jail  in 
which  I  found  myself,  to  borrow  some  words  from  Michel  Foucault,  con- 
tained "so  many  cages,  so  many  theatres  in  which  each  actor  is  alone."^  De- 
signed to  maximize  the  visibility  and  solitariness  of  its  inmates,  this  industrial 
prison  was,  in  Foucault 's  language,  the  "reverse  of  the  principle  of  the  dun- 
geon." Its  goals  were  as  simple  as  its  architecture:  surveillance  and  control. 

From  my  perch  on  a  second-floor  metal  staircase  in  the  central  atrium  of 
the  prison's  "A"  Wing,  I  had  a  panoramic  view  of  the  well-lit,  airy  building 
with  its  solitary  cages  and  theaters  spread  out  all  around  me.  To  my  left  and 
right  stretched  long  corridors  of  symmetrically  spaced  cells,  all  with  identi- 
cal caste-iron  doors  and  spy-holes  crisscrossed  with  thin  metal  bars.  Above 
and  beneath  me  were  more  floors  with  more  corridors  lined  with  more  cells, 
more  metal  doors  and  more  peepholes.  By  swiveling  around  in  a  circle,  I 


146  ANDREW  KEEN 

could  see  all  the  doors  of  all  the  cells  on  all  the  floors  of  "A"  Wing.  The  view 
gave  me  a  feeling  of  omniscient  control.  As  if  I  was  God,  perhaps.  Or  Jeremy 
Bentham. 

It  isn't  surprising  that  the  original  architect  of  this  Oxford  prison  was 
William  Blackburn  (1750-1790),  "the  father  of  the  radial  plan  for  prisons"^ 
and  Britain's  leading  pioneer  of  Bentham's  ideas.  Begun  in  1785,  a  couple 
of  years  before  Bentham  published  his  open  letter  from  Russia  about  the 
Inspection-House,  Blackburn's  prison  replaced  what  had  popularly  become 
known  as  the  "dung-heap"^  of  Oxford  castle's  notoriously  chaotic  public 
dungeons  with  a  brand-new  semicircular  building  designed  as  a  giant  eye  to 
watch  over  its  inmates. 

The  prison's  three-tiered  "A"  Wing  had  been  added  between  1848  and 
1856 — overlapping,  as  it  happens,  with  the  building  of  Prince  Albert's 
equally  light  and  airy  Crystal  Palace,  and  incarcerating  many  of  the  same 
impoverished  men  and  women"^  that  the  enlightened  Albert  hoped  would 
visit  the  Great  Exhibition.  It  was  a  prison  premised  upon  the  principle  of 
perpetual  peeking,  a  very  different  kind  of  great  exhibition  from  the  festival 
of  science  and  technology  put  on  in  the  Crystal  Palace.  Cells  were  built  with 
one-way  spy-holes  that  destroyed  the  prisoner's  privacy  and  enabled  the  au- 
thorities to  watch  them  at  will.  Solitary  confinement  replaced  physical  beat- 
ing as  the  dominant  mode  of  punishment.  Prisoners  were  given  numbers 
that  became  their  institutional  identity.  Beginning  in  the  1860s,  the  authori- 
ties developed  a  system  of  criminal  record-keeping  that  took  advantage 
of  the  then-revolutionary  technology  of  photography  to  establish  mug  shots 
of  the  prisoners.  Those  incarcerated  in  Oxford  prison,  to  borrow  some  words 
from  Mark  Zuckerberg,  possessed  only  one  identity.  The  point  was  to  super- 
vise the  prisoners'  every  movement  and  manage  their  time  down  to  the  very 
minute  so  that  they  were  transformed  from  complex  human  beings  with 
their  "own  lives"  into  packaged  time  lines  of  processed  information. 

Not  much  changed  in  "A"  Wing  between  the  late  nineteenth  and  twenti- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  147 

eth  centuries.  "The  present  Oxford  prison,"  notes  Jan  Morris  in  the  mid- 
1960s,  "in  the  grim  purlieus  of  the  castle  ...  is  a  small  but  awful  place,  filled 
with  the  janglings  of  keys,  the  scraping  of  padlocks,  the  tramp  of  feet  and 
the  voices  of  warders  echoing  against  old  stone  walls."^  This  is  a  picture  with 
which  many  fans  of  classic  sixties  British  movies  will  be  familiar.  The  jail 
scenes  of  the  1969  movie  The  Italian  Job — starring  Michael  Caine  as  the 
crooked  Charlie  Crocker  and  the  inimitable  Noel  Coward  as  crime  boss  Mr. 
Bridget — were  filmed  in  Oxford's  "A"  Wing  and  offer  a  blackly  comic  intro- 
duction to  prison  life  during  the  late  industrial  age.^ 

By  the  early  twenty-first  century,  however,  "A"  Wing  jangled  with  the 
sound  of  a  very  different  sort  of  key.  In  September  1996,  Her  Majesty's 
Prison  (HMP)  Oxford  was,  so  to  speak,  unlocked  and,  in  the  language  of  its 
official  guide,  "redeveloped  as  a  leisure  and  retail  complex."^  A  British  com- 
pany called  the  Malmaison  Group  that  creates  hotels  "that  dare  to  be  differ- 
ent"^ acquired  the  prison  and,  maintaining  the  simple  architecture  of 
William  Blackburn's  Benthamite  building,  turned  it  into  a  boutique  hotel. 

It  is  now  called  The  Oxford  Mai  and  is  a  simulacrum  of  the  nineteenth- 
century  prison.  The  old  cells  have  been  transformed  into  luxury  bedrooms 
distinguished  by  their  original  spyholes  and  caste  iron  doors.  The  "A"  Block 
is  now  a  bright,  sunlit  atrium,  designed  as  a  walkway  between  the  hotel's  pri- 
vate bedrooms  and  its  public  parts.  And  the  old  solitary  confinement  cells  in 
the  basement  of  the  prison  have  been  transformed  into  a  tasteful  restaurant, 
the  Destination  Brasserie,  where  I  had  just  eaten  a  breakfast  of  grilled  kip- 
pers and  scrambled  eggs  with  @quixotic. 

In  one  memorable  scene  from  The  Italian  Job,  Charlie  Crocker  breaks 
into  the  high-security  prison  in  order  to  pitch  Mr.  Bridger  with  the  idea  of 
stealing  $4  million  worth  of  Chinese  gold.  Today,  however,  the  Oxford  Mai 
has  become  such  a  desirable  place  that  it's  not  just  innovative  criminals  who 
would  like  to  break  into  its  luxurious  rooms.  "This  time  we're  taking  no  pris- 
oners," t\vc  Oxford  Mai's  Web  site  playfully  markets  itself  to  guests  like 


148  ANDREW  KEEN 

myself.  "Imagine  a  prison  that's  a  hotel.  . . .  Now  imagine  a  prison  that's  sud- 
denly a  luxury  boutique  hotel  in  Oxford,  destination  brasserie  and  hang-out 
for  high-life  hoodlums.  Pinch  yourself  You're  doing  time  at  the  Mai. " 

And  I  wasn't  alone  doing  time  at  the  Oxford  Mai.  All  the  technology  inno- 
vators who  were  speaking  at  the  "Silicon  Valley  Comes  to  Oxford"  event — 
from  Reid  Hoffman,  Philip  Rosedale  and  Biz  Stone  to  Chris  Sacca  and  Mike 
Malone — were  also  guests  in  this  luxury  boutique  hotel.  To  imagine  all  these 
social  media  magnates — especially  the  geeky,  cheeky  Stone  and  the  cherubic 
Hoffman — locked  up  inside  the  luxurious  bedroom  of  a  refurbished  prison  is, 
of  course,  deliciously  ironic.  But  the  hotel's  significance  extends  beyond 
irony.  It's  a  picture  of  where  we  may,  one  day,  all  be  living. 

As  a  British  version  of  a  Las  Vegas  theme  hotel  or  a  Hollywood  set,  some 
might  see  the  Oxford  Mai  an  example  of  what  Umberto  Eco  and  Jean  Baud- 
rillard  call  hyperreality.  "The  completely  real  becomes  identified  with  the 
completely  fake.  Absolute  unreality  is  offered  as  real  presence,"  Eco  explains, 
while  Baudrillard  defines  hyperreality  as  "the  simulation  of  something  which 
never  really  existed."  History  has  repeated  itself  with  the  Oxford  prison, 
Baudrillard  and  Eco  might  say,  first  as  a  tragedy  and  then  as  fake. 

Rather  than  a  simple  fake  like  Madeleine  Elster  in  Hitchcock's  Vertigo, 
however,  the  Oxford  Mai  is  both  a  historical  fact  and  an  artifact  of  the  future. 
While  the  twenty-first-century  hotel  has  the  appearance  of  a  nineteenth- 
century  prison,  its  real  identity  is  the  exact  reverse.  Instead  of  giving  the  au- 
thorities the  power  to  look  into  the  cell,  the  Oxford  Mai  empowers  its 
customers  with  the  technology  to  gaze  out  into  the  public  atrium.  "The 
peephole  is  reversed,  so  that  guests  can  look  out,"  Fodor's  travel  guide  ex- 
plains the  revised  technology  on  the  Mai's  doors.^  With  this  reversal,  Ben- 
tham's  omnipresent  master  of  the  Inspection-House  is  replaced  with  Walter 
Kirn's  atomized  army  of  small  brothers,  the  private  peeps  imprisoned  in 
parallel  electronic  theaters,  who  can  see  out,  but  can  neither  be  seen  them- 
selves, nor  know  or  observe  their  physical  neighbor. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  149 

We  are  encouraged  to  imagine  a  prison  that's  a  hotel  by  the  Malmaison 
Web  site.  But  a  better  way  to  think  about  the  Oxford  Mai  is  to  imagine  a 
hotel  that's  a  prison — a  place  that  incarcerates  us  without  us  knowing  it.  And 
that's  exactly  what  I  was  imagining  on  the  morning  of  my  Oxford  debate 
with  @quixotic  about  whether  digital  man  would  be  more  socially  connected 
than  his  industrial  ancestor.  As  I  gazed  onto  the  Mai's  spotlighted  atrium,  I 
imagined  the  hotel — with  the  reversed  peepholes  on  its  iron  doors — to  be 
a  microcosm  of  our  socially  networked  future.  But,  I  realized,  there  was  one 
key  ingredient  of  the  future  missing  from  the  "A"  Block. 

Hypervisibility. 

My  eyes  rolled  up  and  down  the  Mai's  long  corridors  lined  with  cages  in 
which  each  hotel  guest  is  perfectly  alone.  What  would  happen,  I  wondered, 
if  all  the  caste-iron  doors  in  the  hotel  disappeared?  What  if  everyone,  all  the 
peeps  in  their  parallel  cells,  could  see  what  everyone  else  was  doing?  What  if 
we  all  lived  in  public? 

I  pinched  myself  Then  what? 

We  Live  in  Public 

"The  future  is  already  here,"  William  Gibson  observed  in  1993,  "it's  just 
unevenly  distributed."  One  version  of  the  future,  at  least  our  social  future, 
may  have  arrived,  a  handful  of  years  after  Gibson  first  made  this  prescient 
remark,  at  the  very  end  of  the  twentieth  century.  An  entrepreneur  named 
Josh  Harris  invented  it.  "The  greatest  Internet  pioneer  you've  never  heard 
of,"^^  Harris  is  one  of  the  earliest  dotcom  millionaires  who,  in  the  Internet 
boom  of  the  nineties,  founded  the  New  York  City-based  Jupiter  Research 
consultancy  firm  and  the  video  Web  site  Pseudo.com.  But  Harris  is  less  well 
known  as  an  innovative  hotel  proprietor.  And  yet  if  Josh  Harris  is  remem- 
bered as  any  kind  of  pioneer,  it  will  be  as  the  founder  of  a  real  malmaison — a 
hotel  that,  quite  literally,  was  a  prison. 

You'll  remember  that  oversharing  advocate  Steven  Johnson  described 


150  ANDREW  KEEN 

today's  Web  3.0  world  as  "a  networked  version  of  The  Truman  Show,  where 
we  are  all  playing  Truman,"'^  Josh  Harris  took  this  one  crazy  step  further. 
Having  seen  The  Truman  Show,  Peter  Weir's  1998  movie  about  everyman 
Truman  Burbank  (played  with  Jimmy  Stewart-style  innocence  by  Jim  Car- 
rey) whose  real  life  was  broadcast  to  millions  of  rapt  television  viewers,  Har- 
ris decided  to  transform  Weir's  fictional  movie  into  a  real-life  experiment  in 
uncensored,  always-on  broadcast  media. 

At  the  beginning  of  December  1999,  as  part  of  an  art  project  entitled 
"Quiet:  We  Live  in  Public,"  Harris  opened  a  basement  hotel  in  New  York 
City  called  Capsule.  It  comprised  one  hundred  pod-style  rooms  that,  in 
contrast  with  the  Oxford  Mai,  had  neither  walls  nor  doors.  Capsule  was 
designed  to  eliminate  loneliness.  It  was  a  boutique  social  hotel,  containing 
architecture  of  such  radical  transparency  that  nothing,  not  even  its  guests' 
most  intimate  actions  or  thoughts,  were  kept  private. 

By  turning  his  lens  on  his  subjects  so  that  they  all  became  stars  of  their 
own  twenty-four-hour-a-day  broadcast  show,  Harris  pioneered  the  social 
network  business  model  a  full  decade  before  the  birth  of  Hyperpublic,  Air- 
time,  BeKnown  or  LivingSocial.  Everything  in  the  Capsule  hotel — from  its 
food  and  alcohol  served  on  its  forty-foot  dining  table  reminiscent  of  the 
communal  tables  in  Sir  Thomas  More's  Utopia  to  its  pod-style  accommoda- 
tion to  the  use  of  its  underground  gun  range — was  free.  Everything  that  is, 
except,  the  information  that  the  Capsule  hotel  guests,  the  100  Truman 
Burbanks,  generated.  Josh  Harris  owned  that  information,  a  Term  of  Ser- 
vice made  unambiguously  clear  to  all  the  participants  in  the  Quiet  project. 

You  see,  the  whole  point  of  the  Capsule  hotel,  its  modus  vivendi,  was 
enabling  real  identities,  blood-and-flesh  people,  to  generate  massive  amounts 
of  data.  This  Inspection-House  envisioned  @quixotic's  idea  of  Web  3.0  be- 
fore anyone  had  even  imagined  Web  2.0.'^  There  were,  therefore,  cameras 
everywhere  in  the  hotel — in  the  communal  dining  area,  in  the  pods,  in  the 
showers,  even  in  the  bathrooms.  Josh  Harris's  "business  model,"  if  that's  the 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  151 

right  term  for  this  grossly  exploitative  project — was  the  collection  of  the 
most  intimate  personal  data  from  the  hotel's  residents. 

Fortunately,  Harris's  Capsule  hotel  experiment,  this  late-twentieth- 
century  simulacrum  of  Bentham's  Inspection-House,  was  itself  captured  on 
camera  by  the  filmmaker  Ondi  Timoner  in  her  2009  documentary  We  Live 
in  Public,  which  won  the  documentary  Grand  Jury  Prize  at  the  Sundance 
film  festival.  Timoner's  uncompromisingly  intimate  work,  which  she  described 
to  me  as  a  "hyperbolic  version  of  reality,"  is  sobering  viewing  in  a  social  me- 
dia age  that  Philip  Rosedale  insists  will  result  in  a  unity  of  man.  After  a 
month  of  living  in  full  view  of  the  camera,  the  project  broke  down  in  collec- 
tive paranoia,  sexual  jealousy,  hatred  and  physical  violence.  In  its  portrayal 
of  the  anti-social  nature  of  such  radical  social  transparency,  MIT  Professor 
Sherry  Turkle,  the  author  oi Alone  Together,  could  have  scripted  We  Live  in 
Public.  Rather  than  eliminating  loneliness,  Harris's  experiment  only  com- 
pounded it.  As  one  distraught  participant  in  the  Quiet  project  told  Timoner, 
"The  more  you  get  to  know  each  other,  the  more  alone  you  become." 

The  most  troubling  thing  of  all  about  Josh  Harris's  Quiet  project  was  the 
reappearance  of  the  apparatchik.  As  one  hotel  guest  told  Ondi  Timoner  in 
We  Live  in  Public,  "It  was  an  absolute  surveillance  police-state."  Once  volun- 
teers checked  into  the  Capsule  Hotel,  they  weren't  allowed  to  check  out. 
With  hyperreal  bad  taste,  Harris  and  his  minions  even  dressed  themselves  in 
the  style  of  the  apparat,  cross-examining  the  citizens  of  Quiet  in  the  sadistic 
style  of  the  interrogators  in  Arthur  Koestler's  Darkness  at  Noon  or  Orwell's 
Nineteen  Eighty-Four,  digging  for  the  most  humiliating  self-revelations 
about  their  mental  breakdowns,  drug  addictions  and  attempted  suicides. 

Not  satisfied  with  ruining  other  people's  lives,  Harris  then  destroyed 
his  own  life  by  transforming  himself  into  Truman  Burbank.  After  the 
Capsule  Hotel  was  shut  down  by  the  New  York  police  on  New  Year's  Day 
2000,  he  turned  the  prying,  peeping  cameras  on  himself  and  began  to 
broadcast  an  entirely  uncensored,  twenty-four-hour  version  of  his  own  life 


152  ANDREW  KEEN 

onWeLiveInPublic.com.  This  absurdly  self-destructive  experiment  resulted 
not  only  in  the  death  of  Harris's  most  intimate  friendship,  his  relationship 
with  his  girlfriend,  but  eventually  in  his  own  reputational  and  financial 
bankruptcy.  Today,  Harris  lives  in  Ethiopia,  in  exile  from  his  family,  friends 
and  creditors,  the  saddest  Internet  visionary  you've  never  heard  of,  a  corpse 
of  a  man  who  tried  to  own  all  of  our  images,  but  now  owns  nothing  at  all. 

But,  rather  than  signaling  the  end  of  the  future,  Josh  Harris's  failure  is 
actually  just  its  beginning.  As  Ondi  Timoner  told  me,  "The  Internet  is  herd- 
ing us  along  so  that  all  of  us  are  now  trading  our  privacy."  Instead,  however, 
ofWeLiveInPublic.com  or  the  Capsule  Hotel,  the  death  of  privacy  will  be 
authored  by  a  little  gadget  that  we  tuck  into  our  pockets  or  wear  as  a  pendant. 

The  Return  of  the  Apparatchik 

The  future  might  have  once  been  unevenly  distributed,  but  there  will  be  a 
time  when  its  distribution  is  universal.  In  this  future,  we  will  all  have  joined 
the  apparat.  Yes  it  will  be  as  weird  as  hell. 

This  future  is  called  a  Super  Sad  True  Love  Story.  It  is  imagined  by  sati- 
rist Gary  Shteyngart,  the  author  of  a  creepy  2010  noveP^  about  a  dystopian 
future  in  which  we  all  own  a  chic  little  device  called  an  Apparat  that  quanti- 
fies and  ranks  the  massive  amounts  of  personal  data  being  generated  by  our 
real  identities. 

Shteyngart  explains  his  data  dystopia  in  which  we  all  live  in  public:  "Every- 
one has  this  device  called  the  'Apparat,'  which  they  wear  either  tucked  into 
their  pocket  or  usually  as  a  pendant.  The  moment  you  enter  a  room  everyone 
judges  you.  So  it  has  what's  called  'Rate  Me  Plus'  technology.  So  you're  rated 
immediately.  Everyone  can  chip  in  and  rate  everyone  else,  and  everyone 
does."i^ 

When  he  appeared  on  my  TechcrunchTV  show  in  July  2011,  Shteyngart 
described  this  world  as  "William  Gibson  land."^^  It's  a  place  where  our  per- 
sonalities are  quantified  in  universally  accessible,  real-time  lists  akin  to 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  153 

Internet  reputation  networks  like  Hashable  or  Kred.  Mystery,  privacy  and 
secrecy  will  have  all  been  eliminated  in  this  transparent  marketplace.  To- 
day's reputation  stock  market  Empire  Avenue  will  have  replaced  Wall  Street 
as  the  key  exchange  of  value.  It  will  be  a  pure  reputation  economy,  a  market- 
place of  mirrors  a  perfect  data  market  in  how  others  see  us. 

This  Apparat,  Shteyngart  explained  to  me,  is  a  fully  mature,  all-knowing 
version  of  those  contemporary  gadgets  like  the  iPhone  and  Google's  An- 
droid smartphones  that  spy  on  us  today.  "My  Apparat  quickly  zoomed  in 
past  the  data  outflows  spilling  out  from  the  customers  like  polluted  surf 
falling  upon  once-pristine  stores  and  focused  on  McKay  Watson,"  Super  Sad 
True  Love  Story  s  narrator,  Lenny  Abramov,  notes  about  a  complete  stranger 
he  happens  to  meet  in  a  retail  store,  but  whose  most  intimate  information 

he  had  immediately  accessed  on  his  Apparat.  "I  caressed  McKay's  data She 

had  graduated  from  Tufts  with  a  major  in  international  affairs  and  a  minor 
in  Retail  science.  Her  parents  were  retired  professors  in  Charlottesville,  Vir- 
ginia where  she  grew  up.  She  didn't  have  a  boyfriend  at  present  but  enjoyed 
the  "reverse  cowgirl"  position  with  the  last  one. . .  ."^'^ 

In  Shteyngart's  world,  we  won't  own  the  Apparat — it  will  own  us. 
This  all-knowing  gadget  is  manufactured  by  a  huge  corporation  called 
LandO'LakesGMFordCredit  (today's  "HyperPublicLivingSocialPeek- 
You,"  perhaps),  which  aggregates  and  stores  all  our  personal  information — 
our  wealth,  our  worldliness,  our  dress  sense,  our  sexuality — and  broadcasts 
this  to  the  entire  world.  In  Super  Sad  True  Love  Story,  we,  the  peeps,  young 
women  like  McKay  Watson,  have  been  transformed,  like  Josh  Harris  and  his 
pitiable  girlfriend  in  WeLiveInPublic.com,  into  transparent  data,  that  most 
desirable  of  information  (for  everyone  except  ourselves). 

In  this  dystopia,  we  will  all  live  in  public  in  a  permanent  Capsule  hotel, 
akin  to  contemporary  social  media  networks  like  SnoopOn.me  or  Creepy. 
In  this  apparat-saturated  world,  everyone  has  a  public  profile  with  their 
income,  their  blood  type,  their  cholesterol  level,  their  sexual  preferences. 


154  ANDREW   KEEN 

their  spending  power  and,  above  all,  their  consumer  habits.  Nobody  can 
escape  the  universal  shadow  of  their  apparat,  which — with  its  Rate  Me 
Plus  technology — is  the  electronic  realization  of  Bentham's  Auto-Icon,  an 
inescapable  prison,  a  perpetual  "A"  Block  in  which  we  all  live  in  our  own 
image. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  Shteyngart's  dark  adventure  in  William  Gibson 
land  is  a  super  sad  love  story.  But  is  it  realistic?  Could  it  turn  out  to  be  true'i 

The  Scoble  Story 

I  have  to  confess  that  I  made  no  reference  to  the  Malmaison  and  Capsule 
hotels  or  the  Apparat  in  my  Oxford  debate  with  Reid  Hoffman.  Nor  did  I 
mention  Josh  Harris,  Gary  Shteyngart  or  WeLiveInPublic.com.  I  suspect  all 
these  futuristic  pictures  of  social  media  would  have  been  dismissed  by  the 
rigorously  analytical  @quixotic  as  both  excessively  fantastic  and  pessimis- 
tic. Like  Steven  Johnson,  Hoffman  would  probably  have  written  off  Josh 
Harris  as  a  "holy  fool"  and  "demented  visionary" ^'^  who  might  be  a  compel- 
ling subject  for  a  documentary  movie,  but  who  bore  no  relation  to  reality. 

And  so  our  debate  was  rather  dull,  full  of  polite,  respectful  disagreement 
about  what  Peter  Drucker  described  as  the  "great  transition"  between  indus- 
trial and  knowledge  society,  rather  than  a  serious  exchange  of  views.  We 
both  acknowledged  that  social  media  communities  would,  in  some  ways, 
replace  the  nation-state  as  the  source  of  personal  identity  in  the  twenty-first 
century.  But  what  would  this  future  look  like?  We  didn't  know  because,  in 
contrast  with  Gary  Shetyngart,  neither  Reid  Hoffman  nor  I  had  visited 
William  Gibson  land. 

But  a  few  weeks  after  my  Oxford  debate  with  @quixotic,  after  I  had  re- 
turned home  to  Northern  California,  I  took  a  trip  into  the  future  to  see  how 
social  media  would  replace  the  nation-state  as  a  source  of  personal  identity 
in  the  twenty-first  century.  My  journey  began  in  San  Francisco,  at  the 
Golden  Gate  Bridge,  the  site  of  Madeleine  Lister's  iconic  dive  into  the  Bay 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  155 

in  Hitchcock's  Vertigo.  I  was  driving  south,  down  through  San  Francisco 
where  Biz  Stone's  Twitter  is  headquartered,  down  through  the  Santa  Clara 
Valley,  once  known  as  the  "valley  of  heart's  delight"  but  today  the  corporate 
location  of  Mark  Zuckerberg's  Facebook,  Reid  Fioffman's  Linkedin,  Larry 
Page's  Google  and  the  hundreds  of  other  Silicon  Valley  companies  building 
the  social  architecture  of  our  Web  3.0  world. 

I  drove  south  on  Route  101,  that  notoriously  clogged  artery  that  links 
San  Francisco  with  San  Jose  and,  even  farther  south,  passes  close  to  San  Juan 
Bautista,  the  eighteenth-century  mission  settlement  where  Fiitchcock  filmed 
Madeleine  Elster's  murder  and  Judy  Barton's  suicide.  But  I  got  off  101  before 
San  Jose  and  headed  west,  winding  my  way  through  the  Santa  Cruz  moun- 
tains where  Hitchcock  himself  once  had  a  house  and  arriving  on  the  Pacific 
coast  just  north  of  Pescadero,  the  little  fishing  village  where  Gordon  Moore, 
Intel's  co-founder  and  the  author  of  Moore's  Law,  grew  up. 

"One  final  thing  I  have  to  do  and  then  I'll  be  free  of  the  past,"  Scottie 
Ferguson  tells  Judy  Barton  in  Vertigo's  final  scene  as  they  drive  south  from 
San  Francisco  down  the  Californian  coast  toward  San  Juan  Bautista.  But 
rather  than  freeing  myself  of  the  past,  my  business  over  the  Santa  Cruz  moun- 
tains was  visiting  the  future.  I'd  come  to  the  Pacific  coast  to  interview  Rob- 
ert Scoble,  Silicon  Valley's  uber-evangelist  of  social  media  and  one  of  the 
earliest  settlers  in  William  Gibson  land. 

Unlike  Josh  Harris,  Robert  Scoble  is  neither  a  "holy  fool"  nor  a  "demented 
visionary."  A  former  "chief  Humanizing  officer"  at  Microsoft;,  columnist  at 
Fast  Company  magazine,  and  the  co-author  of  a  well-received  book  about  the 
value  of  transparent  conversation,^^  Scoble  is  a  much  admired  evangelist  of 
social  media  and  among  Silicon  Valley's  most  influential  cheerleaders  of  to- 
day's digital  love-in.  ^t  Economist  magazine  described  him  as  a  "minor  celeb- 
rity among  geeks  worldwide,"^^  and  the  Financial  Times  newspaper  included 
Scoble — who  tweets  to  his  almost  200,000  followers  as  @scobleizer — in  their 
March  2011  list  of  the  five  most  influential  tweeters  in  the  world.^° 


156  ANDREW  KEEN 

If  William  Gibson  is  correct  and  the  future  has  already  arrived,  then  it 
has  shown  up  in  the  shape  of  @scobleizer.  He  is  among  the  most  hypervis- 
ible  figures  in  digital  society,  with  a  Klout  ranking  higher  than  that  of 
Barack  Obama.^^  In  addition  to  his  commitment  to  Twitter — where  he  has 
authored  over  50,000  tweets  in  the  five  years  since  joining  the  service  in 
2006  and  to  Google  +  where  he  amassed  114,500  followers  in  just  six 
weeks, ^^  he  has  been  a  very  vocal  early  champion  of  the  geo-location  service 
foursquare  as  well  as  the  social  planning  network  Plancast,  the  social  driv- 
ing network  Waze,  the  social  traveling  network  Tripit,  the  social  photogra- 
phy network  Instagram,  the  social  food  network  My  Fav  Food,  the  social 
television  network  Into. now,  and  even  Cyclometer,  the  social  bicycling 
network  where  you  can  follow  him  as  he  rides  around  Silicon  Valley. ^^ 
Wherever  he  is,  whatever  he  is  doing  or  thinking,  Scoble  can  be  found  by 
his  network.  He  lives  in  William  Gibson  land — a  place  not  unlike  the 
town  of  Seahaven  in  The  Truman  Show,  a  giant  electronic  stage  where  all  of 
his  activities  are  broadcasted  all  of  the  time. 

Above  all,  Scoble  is  a  champion  of  what  he  calls  an  "open  web"  and  of 
living  in  public.  He  frequently  announces  the  death  of  privacy,  confessing 
on  my  TechcrunchTV  show  in  December  2010  that  "even  if  we  tried  to  have 
a  conversation  that  was  private,  the  likelihood  that  it  would  stay  private  isn't 
very  high."  Not  that  @scobleizer,  who  openly  tweets  about  almost  every  as- 
pect of  his  life,  cares  about  the  disappearance  of  the  private  realm.  "I  want  to 

live  my  life  in  public Me,  count  me  out  of  this  whole  privacy  thing,"  he 

blogged  in  May  2010,  confessing  that  "I  wish  Facebook  had  NO  PRIVACY 
ATALL!"^^ 

This  champion  of  publicness  lives — physically  resides,  that  is — with  his 
wife  and  children  in  the  exclusive  Pacific  coast  town  of  Half  Moon  Bay,  an 
idyllic  seaside  resort  that,  in  its  spotlessness,  resembles  The  Truman  Show's 
Seahaven.  Scoble 's  mock  Mediterranean-style  house  is  up  the  road  from 
the  luxury  Ritz-Carlton  Hotel,  located  inside  a  gated  community  made  up 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  157 

of  identical  mock  Mediterranean-style  houses.  As  I  checked  in  with  the  se- 
curity officer  guarding  Scoble's  community  from  the  outside  world,  I 
couldn't  help  thinking  about  the  not  entirely  unsurprising  paradox  of  the 
world's  leading  champion  of  openness  living  inside  a  gated  community  of  an 
exclusive  Pacific  coast  town — an  enclave  within  an  enclave — that  cut  him 
off  from  the  rest  of  the  world. 

"What's  the  number  of  Robert  Scoble's  house?"  I  asked  the  uniformed 
security  guard  who  controlled  the  electronic  gate  to  the  housing  complex. 

But  I  must've  misheard  the  number,  because  when  I  rang  on  the  bell  of 
the  house,  the  man  in  the  baseball  cap  and  shorts  who  opened  the  door  had 
never  heard  of  the  hypervisible  Scoble.  "Who?"  he  replied  to  me  blankly  about 
a  global  celebrity  who  possesses  one  the  most  hypervisible  brands  on  the 
Internet.  Obviously,  the  guy  wasn't  on  Yatown,  Nextdoor.com  or  Hey, 
Neighbor!,  the  social  networks  that  connected  actual  neighbors  and  neigh- 
borhoods. 

As  it  happened,  Scoble  lived  in  the  house  over  the  street.  He  greeted  me 
with  his  signature  "Hey,  what's  up!"  and  we  went  upstairs  to  the  studio  from 
where  he  broadcasted  himself  The  personally  very  likeable  social  media 
evangelist — whose  cheerful  manner,  shiny  face,  and  opaque  eyes  really  do 
bring  to  mind  Truman  Burbank — sat  opposite  me.  Behind  him  was  a  thirty- 
inch  computer  monitor  broadcasting  @scobleizer's  page  on  Twitter.  Every 
few  seconds,  a  new  tweet  from  one  of  Scoble's  Twitter  friends  appeared  on 
the  screen.  So,  as  I  looked  at  the  real  Scoble,  I  was  simultaneously  looking  at 
his  Twitter  feed  too.  Here,  I  realized,  was  a  digital  Jeremy  Bentham  inside 
his  electronic  Auto-Icon — a  man  who  resembled  his  own  images.  He  had, 
quite  literally,  become  information.  Not  only  was  it  as  weird  as  hell,  but  it 
was  super  creepy,  too. 

"How  long  you  have  you  been  living  opposite  each  other?"  I  asked  Scoble 
about  his  neighbor. 

"A  couple  of  years." 


158  ANDREW  KEEN 

"And  he  doesn't  know  you!?" 

Ihe  irony  of  one  of  the  world's  best  known  and  most  popular  social 
media  evangelists  not  being  known  by  the  man  over  the  street  only  com- 
pounded the  surreal  experience  of  simultaneously  staring  at  Scoble  and  his 
Twitter  feed.  I  was  looking  for  the  human  in  Scoble,  but  couldn't  see  it.  For 
a  moment,  I  wondered  if  he  really  existed.  Maybe  Scoble  really  was  @scoble- 
izer.  Perhaps,  I  imagined,  this  social  media  evangelist  who  has  chosen  to  ex- 
ist in  public  actually  does  live  on  the  network. 

In  a  sense,  he  does — on  every  network,  that  is,  except  Hey,  Neighbor!  or 
Nextdoor.com.  As  we  sat  that  afternoon  in  his  media-saturated  room,  the 
pixellated  glow  of  his  screen  casting  a  flickering  shadow  over  his  Truman- 
like face,  Scoble  explained  to  me  that  he  chose  to  make  his  friends  through 
social  networks  rather  than  through  his  immediate  physical  community  in 
Half  Moon  Bay.  He  confessed  to  me  that  he  had  more  in  common  with 
Web  programmers  in  Beijing  and  social  media  entrepreneurs  in  Berlin  than 
he  had  with  local  people  such  as  his  unknown  neighbor.  Thus,  he  explained, 
he  chose  to  make  his  friends  on  the  Internet,  using  social  networks  to  iden- 
tify people  around  the  world  with  whom  he  shared  interests. 

Scoble,  I  realized,  represented  a  future  that  neither  @quixotic  nor  I  could 
clearly  see  in  our  Oxford  debate.  Scoble 's  individualized,  personalized  com- 
munity— a  peculiar  synthesis  of  the  cult  of  the  individual  and  the  cult  of  the 
social — offered  the  answer  to  how  social  media  communities  might  eventu- 
ally replace  the  nation-state  as  the  source  of  identity  in  the  twenty-first  cen- 
tury. In  the  nineteenth  and  twentieth  centuries,  Ernest  Gellner  reminds  us, 
individuals  were  united  into  physical  communities  by  common  languages 
and  cultures;  today,  the  community  is  becoming  a  reflection  of  that  indi- 
vidual. Scoble 's  social  media  community  was,  therefore,  an  extension  of  his 
self,  a  never-ending  hall  of  mirrors  all  reflecting  the  same  opaque  image  of 
Scoble — which  explained  why,  in  spite  of  his  self-styled  openness  and  good 
cheer,  he  seemed  so  solitary  and  lost,  so  creepily  childlike,  so  much  like 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  159 

Truman  Burbank.  Living  within  his  enclave  within  an  enclave,  simultane- 
ously connected  with  everybody  and  nobody,  his  story,  The  Scoble  Story,  so 
to  speak,  is  a  sneak  preview  of  how  we  will  live  alone  together  in  the  per- 
petually impermanent  twenty-first  century. 

It  was,  I  realized,  the  new  (dis)unity  of  man — a  crystal  prison  of  the  self. 
As  I  stared  at  Scoble  in  his  media  room,  crammed  with  the  digital  cameras, 
screens  and  other  self-broadcasting  esoterica  that  he  carried  everywhere 
with  him,  my  mind  went  back  to  "A"  Block  in  the  Oxford  Mai.  His  elec- 
tronic peephole  was  precluding  the  social  media  evangelist  from  communi- 
cating with  his  neighbors.  As  Richard  Sennett  has  put  it,  "electronic 
communication  is  one  means  by  which  the  very  idea  of  public  life  has  been 
put  to  an  end."^^  And  Scoble,  with  his  free  agent  identity  and  Truman  Bur- 
bank  existential  confusion,  is  one  of  the  first  residents  of  a  digital  society  in 
which  the  social  is  simply  an  extension  of  what  we,  as  individuals,  want. 

There  is  one  important  difference,  though,  between  The  Scoble  Story  and 
The  Truman  Show.  In  Peter  Weir's  fictional  movie,  Truman  Burbank  had  no 
idea  that  his  life  had  become  a  real-time  reality  television  show.  In  contrast, 
Robert  Scoble  not  only  stars  in  The  Scoble  Story  but  he  is  also  the  conscious 
producer  and  the  director  of  his  nonfictional  show.  There  is  nothing  inevi- 
table about  Scoble's  hypervisible  life.  It's  his  choice  to  live  so  openly,  to  re- 
veal his  location  to  his  foursquare  followers,  to  author  51,000  tweets,  to 
photograph  the  Caesar  salad  on  My  Fav  Food  that  he  is  eating  at  the  Ritz- 
Carlton  hotel  in  Half  Moon  Bay^^  and  to  distribute  the  images  on  Instagram, 
to  be  on  Waze,  Tripit,  Into.Now,  Cyclometer  and  all  the  other  transparent 
networks  of  the  social  Web. 

"Are  we  all  becoming  Robert  Scoble?"  my  TechcrunchTV  show  head- 
lined in  December  2010.  "One  day,  for  better  or  worse,"  I  warned,  "we  may 
all  be  Robert  Scoble."^' 

The  truth,  however,  is  that  the  vast  majority  of  us  don't  really  want  to 
become  Scoble.  Most  of  us  aren't  comfortable  living,  like  @scobleizer,  in  the 


160  ANDREW  KEEN 

full  glare  of  the  electronic  public  spotlight.  We  aren't,  as  Reid  Hoffman  be- 
lieves, primarily  social  beings.  And  thus,  in  spite  of  the  social  revolution,  we 
don't  want  all  of  our  information — our  photographs,  our  location,  our  meals, 
our  thoughts,  our  travel  plans,  our  bicycling  trips — published  for  everyone 
else  to  see. 

So  what  to  do?  How  can  we  make  sure  that  our  lives  don't  become 
versions  of  The  Scoble  Show  and  we  become  voyeuristic  inmates  of  a  luxury 
prison,  entirely  disconnected  from  our  neighbors,  yet  possessing  tens  of 
thousands  of  "friends"  that  we  have  never  and  will  never  meet?  How  can  we 
guarantee  our  right  to  privacy  and  secrecy  in  today's  age  of  exhibitionism  so 
that  today's  creepy  doesn't  become  tomorrow's  necessity?  Above  all,  how  can 
we  be  let  alone  so  that  we  remain  true  to  ourselves  as  human  beings  in  a  ver- 
tiginous Web  3.0  world  that  is  already  lurching  into  a  weird  synthesis  of  the 
eerily  luxurious  Oxford  Mai  and  Josh  Harris's  radically  transparent  Capsule 
Hotel? 

To  begin  our  search  for  a  cure  to  today's  digital  vertigo,  we  need  to  look 
at  some  pictures  that  were  never  intended  to  be  displayed  in  public.  And 
once  again  we  must  return  to  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  to  a  soci- 
ety grappling,  like  ours,  with  the  consequences  of  technological  innovation 
on  an  individual's  right  to  protect  their  private  lives  from  the  public  gaze. 


^5 
O 


THE  BEST  PICTURE  OF  2011 

@amgorder  Andrea  Michelle  Ybor — 6' 2"  black  man  w  scruffy  heard  blue  shirt  tan 
shorts  driving  commercial  truck  call  me.  broke  into  wayne  &  raped  me.  Glad  im 
alive.  (27 May  via  HootSuite  Favorite  Retweet  Reply) 

@amgorder:  The  law  has  asked  me  to  stop  tweeting.  Please  contact  their pr  dept  until 
I  have  clearance  to  discuss.  Your  support  has  been  invaluable  (5/27/11) 

The  Most  Valuable  Pictures  of  1848 

We  begin  with  some  pictures  from  an  exhibition.  This  time,  though,  rather 
than  a  single  painting,  it  is  a  series  of  copperplated  etchings,  made  by  two  of 
the  nineteenth-century's  greatest  paragons  of  private  hfe.  Prince  Albert  and 
Queen  Victoria,  in  the  first  days  of  their  marriage.  There  are  sixty-three  per- 
sonal etchings,  of  domestic  scenes  and  of  their  family  and  friends,  including 
their  two  eldest  children,  Bertie — the  heir  to  Victoria's  throne  who  would, 
as  an  undergraduate,  enjoy  the  debates  at  the  Oxford  Union — and  Vicky.  It 
is  an  unintended  exhibition,  private  pictures  created  strictly  for  their  own 
enjoyment  and  celebrating  their  intimate  friendship. 

Between  October  1840  and  November  1847,  Victoria  and  Albert  sent 
these  pictures  to  a  printer  to  make  copies  of  the  copperplates.  But  the  printer's 
journeyman  made  his  own  copies  of  the  etchings  and  sold  them  to  London 
publisher  William  Strange,  who  released  a  printed  exhibition  of  the  works: 
A  Descriptive  Catalogue  of  the  Royal  Victoria  and  Albert  Gallery  of  Etchings.  ^ 
Strange  even  had  the  gall  to  promise  purchasers  of  the  catalogue  a  facsimile 


162  ANDREW  KEEN 

of  either  the  queen's  or  the  prince  consort's  autograph  to  go  along  with 
these  private  pictures. 

In  1848,  the  dispute  appeared  in  court  as  Prince  Albert  v.  Strange,  a 
"famous  case"  according  to  Samuel  Warren  and  Louis  Brandeis,  the  Boston 
lawyers  who  authored  the  iconic  "Right  to  Privacy"  Harvard  Law  Review 
article  that,  you'll  remember,  defined  privacy  as  the  legal  right  to  be  "let 
alone."  In  this  1890  article,  written  in  reaction  to  the  publication  of  an  un- 
invited photograph  in  the  Washington  Post  newspaper  from  the  wedding  of 
Samuel  Warren's  daughter,^  the  lawyers  argued  that  the  technology  of  the 
industrial  revolution  had  compromised  our  right  to  privacy.  "Instantaneous 
photographs  and  newspaper  enterprise  have  invaded  the  sacred  precincts  of 
private  and  domestic  life;  and  numerous  mechanic  devices  threaten  to  make 
good  the  prediction  that  what  is  whispered  in  the  closet  shall  be  proclaimed 
from  the  house-tops^'  they  wrote.  "For  years  there  has  been  a  feeling  that  the 
law  must  afford  some  remedy  for  the  unauthorized  circulation  of  portraits 
of  private  persons."^ 

The  English  law  came  to  the  defense  of  Victoria  and  Albert's  right  to  the 
privacy  of  their  own  pictures.  The  Prince  Albert  v.  Strange  case  was  ruled  in 
favor  of  the  plaintiff,  the  court  holding  that  the  common-law  prohibited  the 
reproduction  of  the  etchings.  And,  as  Warren  and  Brandeis  argue,  this  rul- 
ing provided  an  important  precedent  in  protecting  the  privacy  of  people's 
own  images  during  the  industrial  age. 

Today's  Web  3.0  revolution  offers  similarly  profound  challenges  to  the 
traditional  law  protecting  individual  privacy.  The  Ryan  Giggs  case,  for  ex- 
ample, which  pitted  75,000  people  tweeting  details  of  the  footballer's  extra- 
marital sexual  antics  against  a  British  High  Court  injunction  banning 
public  commentary  about  Giggs 's  private  life,  has  resulted  in  what  Lionel 
Barber,  the  editor  of  The  Financial  Times,  described  as  the  "freedom  debate 
of  our  age."^  On  the  one  hand,  the  law  obviously  can't,  of  course,  punish 
75,000  people  for  tweeting  about  Giggs 's  sex  life;  on  the  other  hand,  how- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  163 

ever,  that  same  law,  which  is  supposed  to  protect  individual  rights  against 
society,  has  to  offer  some  defense  against  public  ridicule  in  a  digital  age  in 
which  anyone,  it  seems,  can  publish  anything  about  anybody  else. 

Lionel  Barber  is  right  to  conclude  that  "the  law  is  manifestly  lagging" 
behind  today's  social  media  revolution.  Unfortunately,  the  Giggs  case  is  just 
the  tip  of  today  s  legal  iceberg.  Everyone  now — from  the  British  plumber  who 
tweeted  about  his  supposedly  adulterous  wife^  to  Julian  Assange,  the  self- 
appointed  tsar  of  WikiLeaked  transparency,  to  the  myriad  of  free  speech 
fundamentalists  on  Twitter — seems  to  think  they  have  the  right  to  publish 
whatever  they  want  online,  without  any  consequences  at  all.  So  how  can 
the  law  catch  up  with  our  use  of  this  networked  technology?  In  our  Web  3.0 
world,  should  we  be  demanding  more  laws  to  protect  the  "sacred  precincts 
of  private  and  domestic  life"  against  what  nineteenth-century  privacy  advo- 
cates Warren  and  Brandeis  called  the  "unseemly  gossip"  of  public  opinion? 

Mark  Zuckerberg  and  Eric  Schmidt  certainly  don't  think  so.  In  late  May 
2011,  in  the  week  leading  up  to  the  G8  summit  in  Deauville,  French  Presi- 
dent Nicolas  Sarkozy  invited  Zuckerberg,  Schmidt  and  several  hundred 
super-nodes  including  myself  to  Paris  to  discuss  the  need  for  government 
to  regulate  the  Internet.  Responding  to  Sarkozy 's  call  at  the  "e-G8"  for  the 
government  to  "civilize"  the  Internet  and  to  protect  the  privacy  of  its  users. 
Schmidt  came  out  against  what  he  called  "stupid"  governmental  rules,  argu- 
ing that  "technology  will  move  faster  than  governments,  so  don't  legislate 
before  you  understand  the  consequences."^  Zuckerberg  was  sUghtly  more 
diplomatic,  but  nonetheless  made  it  clear  that  government  would  be  unwise 
to  regulate  the  innovations  of  today's  social  media  companies. 

In  some  ways,  Zuckerberg  may  be  right.  The  most  effective  cure  for  to- 
day's destruction  of  privacy  isn't  an  avalanche  of  new  legislation.  As  I've  al- 
ready argued,  I'm  against  calls  from  British  and  Mexican  politicians  to 
suspend  social  networks  during  times  of  civil  unrest.  Nor  am  I  in  favor  of 
either  calls  from  the  US  Congress  to  block  the  Taliban  on  Twitter'^  or  to 


164  ANDREW  KEEN 

legally  enable  the  US  Justice  Department  to  unilaterally  search  the  Twitter 
accounts  of  elected  politicians  in  other  countries.^  Like  it  or  not,  twenty- 
first-century  democracy  will  be  increasingly  shaped  by  social  media  and  so 
it's  hard  to  argue  that  a  democratic  government  should  be  able  to  shut  down 
or  control  any  network. 

Besides,  as  Eric  Schmidt  has  argued,  social  media  is,  in  many  ways,  just  a 
mirror.  The  problem  is  that  nobody  is  forcing  any  of  us  to  update  our  photos 
on  Instagram,  reveal  our  location  on  MeMap  or  broadcast  what  we've  just 
eaten  for  lunch  on  My  Fav  Food.  The  most  truthful  picture  in  our  age  of 
great  exhibitionism  is  The  Scoble  Story.  So,  in  spite  of  my  concern  about  the 
increasing  publicness  of  life  in  the  social  media  age,  I'm  ambivalent  about 
calling  on  the  government  or  the  law  courts  to  protect  us  from  our  own 
exhibitionism. 

As  John  Stuart  Mill  argues  in  On  Liberty,  government  exists  to  protect 
us  from  others  rather  than  from  ourselves  and  the  reality,  for  better  or 
worse,  is  that  once  a  photo,  an  update  or  a  tweet  is  publicly  published  on  the 
network,  it  becomes  de  facto  public  property.  So,  without  wishing  to  sound 
too  much  like  the  uber-glib  Eric  Schmidt,  the  only  way  to  really  protect 
one's  own  privacy  is  by  not  publishing  anything  in  the  first  place. 

That  said,  some  governmental  legislation  in  online  privacy  policy — such 
as  the  Federal  Trade  Commission's  March  2011  settlement  with  Google 
over  its  egregiously  "deceptive  privacy  practices"  in  the  search  engine's  Buzz 
social  network  rollout^ — is  necessary.  So  is  a  government  response  to  some 
of  Facebook's  more  flagrant  disregard  for  individual  privacy,  such  as  the 
company's  June  2011  announcement  that  they  were  adding  the  "face  recog- 
nition" to  their  service  as  well  as  the  twenty-year  privacy  settlement  that 
the  government  reached  with  Facebook  in  November  2011  which  requires 
the  social  network  to  get  permission  from  its  users  before  altering  how  their 
personal  information  is  given  out.^°  But  the  problem,  given  the  financial  mus- 
cle, speed  and  virality  of  new  networks  like  Twitter  and  Facebook  compared 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  165 

with  the  slowness  of  government,  is  knowing  where  exactly  to  focus.  As 
MSNBC's  legal  correspondent  Bob  Sullivan  noted  in  March  2011,  "there 
are  no  fewer  than  seven  pieces  of  privacy-related  legislation  that  have 
either  been  introduced  in  the  U.S.  House  of  Representatives,  or  soon  will 
be."^^  That  may  be  why  the  Obama  adminstration  called,  in  December 
2010,  for  the  creation  of  an  Internet  "privacy  bill  of  rights."  This  eighty- 
eight-page  Commerce  Department  report  also  called  for  the  establishment 
of  a  Privacy  Policy  Office  that  would  "serve  as  a  center  of  commercial  data 
privacy  policy  expertise."  ^^  The  need  for  a  more  focused  governmental  re- 
sponse to  the  Web  3.0  revolution  is  also  why,  in  May  2011,  the  White  House 
announced  its  intention  to  offer  up  a  National  Data  Breach  Law  intended  to 
replace  the  patchwork  of  state  laws  with  a  single  federal  standard. ^^ 

Probably  the  most  promising  of  this  current  U.S.  legislation  is  West  Vir- 
ginian Senator  John  D.  Rockefeller's  May  2011  "Do  Not  Track"  bill,  which 
would  require  Web  3.0  data  companies  to  provide  their  users  with  opt  out 
data  collection  buttons.  The  Senate  Commerce  Committee  chairman  is 
correct  to  demand  that  "consumers  have  a  right  to  decide  whether  their  in- 
formation can  be  collected  and  used  online."^^  A  number  of  companies,  includ- 
ing Microsoft  and  Mozilla,  have  already  complied  with  Rockefeller's  bill  and 
the  American  Federal  Trade  Commission  (FTC)  chairman,  Jon  Leibowitz, 
was  right  in  April  2011  to  call  on  the  "laggard"  Google  to  add  a  "Do  Not 
Track"  tool  in  its  Chrome  Internet  browser.^^ 

Other  legislation  is  required  to  guarantee  that  the  law  doesn't  continue 
to  lag  behind  technology.  The  April  2011  brouhaha  over  Google  and  Apple 
smartphones  that  continually  track  their  users  is  certainly  worthy  of  the 
careful  U.S.  Congressional  scrutiny  being  pursued  by  Minnesota  Senator 
Al  Franken.^^  The  former  Saturday  Night  Live  TV  star  is  right  to  demand 
that  Google  and  Apple  should  have  what  he  called,  in  May  2011,  a  "clear 
understandable  privacy  policy"  for  their  smartphone  mobile  apps.^"^  Given 
Google  and  Apple's  pioneering  role  in  the  development  of  the  cloud  economy. 


166  ANDREW  KEEN 

Franken  would  also  be  wise  to  call  for  a  similarly  transparent  privacy  policy 
with  respect  to  massively  powerful  new  services  like  iCloud. 

The  shift  to  the  cloud  opens  up  an  entirely  new  front  on  the  war  to 
protect  privacy.  "A  cloud  gathers  over  our  digital  freedoms"  warns  Charles 
Leadbeater,  a  critic  who  sees,  on  the  immediate  horizon,  a  world  of  what  he 
calls  "Appbook"  and  "Facegoogle"  corporations  controlling  our  personal 
data.^^  Leadbeater  is  far  from  alone  in  fearing  the  cloud.  "As  the  new  new 
gadget  I  hold  in  my  hand  becomes  increasingly  personalized,  easy  to  use, 
'transparent'  in  its  functioning,  the  more  the  entire  set-up  has  to  rely  on 
work  being  done  elsewhere,  on  the  vast  circuit  of  machines  which  coordi- 
nate the  user's  experience,"  notes  the  Slovenian  cultural  critic  Slavoj  Zizek 
about  the  symbiotic  growth  of  personalized  technology  and  corporate 
power.^^  Our  data  privacy,  therefore,  is  particularly  vulnerable  to  "Appbook" 
and  "Facegoogle"  on  the  cloud  and  will  require  the  careful  government  scru- 
tiny of  responsible  politicians  like  Al  Franken. 

Senators  John  Kerry  and  John  McCain's  2011  proposal  to  establish  a 
Commercial  Privacy  Bill  of  Right  is  promising — although,  as  the  Univer- 
sity of  Chicago  economist  Richard  Thaler  argues^^ — it  should  also  include 
the  right  for  consumers  to  access  their  own  data.  And,  as  Senator  Jay  Rock- 
efeller has  consistently  argued,^^  there  is  a  strong  need  to  update  the  Chil- 
dren's Online  Privacy  Protection  Act  (COPPA) — particularly  given  the 
phenomenal  popularity  of  kids'  social  networks  like  Disney's  Togetherville 
and  Mark  Zuckerberg's  misguided  belief  that  children  under  thirteen  should 
be  allowed  on  Facebook. 

The  European  Union  has  been  much  more  aggressive  than  the  United 
States  government  in  pushing  for  privacy  rights  over  social  networks.  On  the 
all-important  issue  of  online  tracking  by  social  media  companies,  for  example, 
European  privacy  regulators  have  been  pushing  to  establish  an  arrangement 
in  which  consumers  could  only  be  tracked  if  they  actively  "opt  in"  and  per- 
mit marketers  to  collect  their  personal  data.^^  Europeans  have  also  been 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  167 

more  aggressive  in  pushing  back  against  the  leading  Web  3.0  companies.  In 
April  2011,  for  example,  the  Dutch  government  threatened  Google  with  fines 
of  up  to  $1.4  million  if  it  continued  to  ignore  data-protection  demands  as- 
sociated with  its  Street  View  technology. ^^  Apple  and  Google  face  much 
tighter  regulation  in  Europe  with  the  EU  classifying  the  location  informa- 
tion that  they  have  been  collecting  from  their  smartphones  as  personal 
data.^"^  European  Union  data  protection  regulators  have  aggressively  scruti- 
nized Facebook's  May  2011  rollout  of  its  facial  recognition  software  that 
reveals  people's  identities  without  their  permission. ^^  Even  European  tech- 
nology chieftans,  like  Vittorio  Colao,  the  CEO  of  the  wireless  giant  Voda- 
phone,  has  openly  criticized  Zuckerberg's  antigovernment  stance  at  the  e-G8, 
arguing  that  laws  which  enhance  online  trust  and  guarantee  privacy  are 
critical  if  the  web  is  to  become  a  civilizing  force  in  the  world. ^^  Certainly  the 
privacy  and  data  panel  on  which  I  spoke  at  the  e-G8  was  sharply  divided 
between  Europeans  and  Americans,  with  the  chairperson  of  the  Mozilla 
browser  Mitchell  Baker  and  Public  Parts  author  Jeff  Jarvis  being  much  less 
sympathetic  to  government  protection  than  European  technology  execu- 
tives like  Intel's  Christian  Morales. 

EU  justice  commissioner  Viviane  Reding  is  even  intending  social  net- 
works to  establish  a  "right  to  be  forgotten"  option  that  would  allow  users 
to  destroy  data  already  published  on  the  network.  "I  want  to  explicitely 
clarify  that  people  shall  have  the  right — and  not  only  the  possibility — to 
withdraw  their  consent  to  data  processing,"  Reding  told  the  EU  parlia- 
ment in  March  201 1.  "The  burden  of  proof  should  be  on  data  controllers — 
those  who  process  your  personal  data.  They  must  prove  that  they  need  the 
data,  rather  than  individuals  having  to  prove  that  collecting  their  data  is 
not  necessary."^^ 

But,  as  much  as  legal  or  political  action,  we  need  more  consumer  literacy 
about  the  core  nature  of  Web  3.0  businesses.  What  consumers  have  to 
understand  is  that  "free"  services  on  the  Internet  are  never  really  free.  As 


168  ANDREW  KEEN 

Reputation.com's  CEO  Michael  Fertik  told  me,  the  business  models  of  sup- 
posedly free  social  networks  like  Facebook  is  the  sale  of  our  information  to 
their  advertisers.  We,  the  producers  of  data  on  the  free  network,  are  its  prod- 
uct rather  than  its  friend  or  partner.  In  the  Web  3.0  age,  therefore,  consum- 
ers should  not  only  carefully  read  their  social  network's  Terms  of  Service 
(TOS)  which  often  need  to  be  shortened  and  simplified  so  anyone  can  un- 
derstand them  (in  contrast,  for  example,  with  Linkedln's  6400  word  no- 
vella of  a  Privacy  Policy), ■^^  but  also  to  recognize  that  Facebook,  Twitter, 
Google,  Zynga,  Groupon,  Apple,  Skype  and  the  other  corporate  pioneers 
of  (g)quixotic's  personal  data  revolution  are  all  multi  billion  dollar  for  profit 
companies,  no  better  and  no  worse  than  for-profit  banks  or  oil  or  pharma- 
ceutical companies. 

Privacy:  The  Web's  Hot  New  Commodity 

The  most  effective  solutions  to  protecting  privacy  may  lie  in  the  market  and 
in  technology  rather  than  in  an  overreliance  on  the  law.  "Big  oil.  Big  Food. 
Big  Pharma.  To  the  catalog  of  corporate  bigs  that  worry  a  lot  of  us  little 
people,  add  this:  Big  Data,"  you'll  remember  The  New  York  Times' Nsitsisha. 
Singer  arguing. ^^  But,  as  we  rightly  worry  more  and  more  about  "big  data" 
in  our  reputation  economy,  so  we  are  seeing  an  explosion  of  start-ups  like 
Fertik's  Reputation.com,  Reppler.com,  Personal  Inc,  Safety  Web,  Abine  Inc, 
TRUSTe,  IntelliProtect  and  Allow  that  all  sell  privacy  services  to  consumers. 
The  Wall  Street  Journal  calls  privacy  the  "web's  hot  new  commodity"  and 
argues  that  "as  the  surreptitious  tracking  of  Internet  users  becomes  more 
aggressive  and  widespread,  tiny  start-ups  and  technology  giants  alike  are 
using  a  new  product:  privacy."^^ 

The  market  is,  of  course,  simply  a  reflection  of  our  collective  desires  and 
actions.  And  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  we,  as  the  market,  will  reject  many  of  the 
more  absurd  or  destructive  social  networks  now  being  funded  in  today's  so- 
cial gold  rush.  The  key  issue  here  is  trust.  Facebook 's  chief  technology  officer 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  169 

Bret  Taylor,  with  whom  I've  pubhcly  clashed  in  the  past  about  online  pri- 
vacy,^^  framed  it  provocatively.  "Trust  is  the  foundation  of  the  social  web," 
Taylor  explained  to  a  highly  skeptical  Jay  Rockefeller  at  a  May  2011  Senate 
hearing  about  Facebook's  policies  toward  children.  "People  will  stop  using 
Facebook  if  they  don't  trust  in  our  services."^^  That  trust  may  already  be 
eroding.  The  New  York  Times'  Jcnna.  Wortham  notes  the  growth  of  what 
she  calls  "Facebook  Resisters,"  people,  like  myself  (I  shut  my  personal  Face- 
book  account  in  September  2011),  who  "steer  clear  of  the  site"  because  it 
makes  "them  feel  more,  not  less,  alienated."^^  Even  Silicon  Valley  super- 
nodes  like  Techcrunch  founder  Mike  Arrington  and  the  organizer  of  the 
popular  Le  Web  conference  Loic  Le  Meur  seem  to  be  losing  trust  in  Face- 
book,  with  Arrington  explaining  that  nobody  goes  to  it  anymore  because 
"it's  too  crowded"^'^  and  Le  Meur  suggesting  that  the  A-List  now  hang  out 
with  their  friends  on  the  supposedly  more  private  Path  network.^^ 

But  in  spite  of  its  resisters,  research  shows  that  today's  Facebook  users  are 
more  trusting  than  average  Internet  users, ^^  which  may  be  one  reason  why 
they  are  often  so  cavalier  with  the  personal  data  that  they  reveal  to  their 
"friends."  The  challenge  is  to  make  users  of  networked  Big  Data  services 
more,  rather  than  less  suspicious.  Fortunately,  there  is  some  evidence  that 
this  is  already  happening  in  terms  of  our  attitude  toward  some  of  the  more 
radical  social  start-ups  of  today's  Web  3.0  economy.  Take,  for  example, 
Blippy,  a  much  hyped  2009  social  start-up  co-founded  by  Philip  Kaplan,  the 
creator  of  Fucked  Company,  a  notorious  Web  site  founded  during  the  2000 
dotcom  crash  that  celebrated  the  bankruptcies  of  many  online  businesses. 
Blippy,  which  raised  $13  million  in  venture  capital  funding,  is  a  social  media 
network  that  requires  its  users  to  publicly  publish  their  credit  card  purchases. 
Fortunately,  the  market  has  said  a  resounding  no  to  such  a  patently  ludicru- 
ous  idea.  "So  it  turns  out  that  almost  nobody  wants  people  to  check  out 
their  new  purchases,"  explained  Techcrunch 's  Alexia  Tsotsis  in  May  2011.^"^ 
Apparently,  Blippy 's  usage  numbers  were  never  "spectacular"  and,  not 


170  ANDREW  KEEN 

surprisingly,  the  site  was  mistrusted  by  most  of  its  users.  "Ouch,"  Tsotsis  ex- 
claimed about  the  death  of  Blippy.  Hallelujah,  I  say,  about  the  demise  of  a 
social  network  that  encouraged  its  users  to  publically  publish  all  their  credit 
card  purchases.  Fucked  Company,  indeed. 

It's  not  just  Blippy  that  the  market  has  rejected.  Back  in  chapter  one,  I 
warned  about  SocialEyes,  a  start-up  founded  in  January  2010  that  created  a 
transparent  wall  of  online  video  cubes  in  which  we  could  all  watch  each 
other  watching  each  other.  But  in  spite  of  raising  over  $5  million,  SocialEyes 
never  attracted  many  users  and,  by  January  2012,  the  service  was  no  longer 
available.  Hopefully,  this  shows  that  the  vast  majority  of  us  don't  want  to  be 
transparent  cubes  in  somebody  else's  video  wall.  Perhaps  our  eyes  aren't 
quite  as  social  as  the  digital  communitarians  would  have  us  believe. 

The  market  may  also  be  pushing  the  social  networking  companies  to  fo- 
cus more  on  making  privacy  central  to  their  service.  As  Vic  Gundotra  and 
Bradley  Horowitz  underlined  when  I  interviewed  them  on  my  TechcrunchT  V 
show,  Google -his  distinguished  from  other  networks,  particularly  Face- 
book,  by  its  networks  of  friends  called  "Circles,"  which  operate  from  the 
default  of  privacy  rather  than  openness.  After  the  publicity  fiascos  and 
market  failures  of  Buzz  and  Wave,  Google  seems  to  have  learnt  that  the 
public  actually  doesn't  want  fully  transparent  networks  that  broadcast  ev- 
erybody's data  to  the  world.  "Rather  than  focus  on  new  snazzy  features  . . . 
Google  has  chosen  to  learn  from  its  own  mistakes,  and  Facebook's. 
Google  decided  to  make  privacy  the  No.  1  feature  of  its  new  service,"  The 
New  York  Times' Nick  Bilton  notes  about  Google  +?^  This  focus  on  privacy 
is  certainly  one  reason  why  the  service  attracted  20  million  users  in  just 
three  weeks  after  its  informal  launch  and  doubled  its  membership  in  its  first 
100  days.  And  with  new  features  like  "Good  to  Know,"^^  which  enables  us- 
ers to  monitor  what's  happening  with  their  Google  data,  one  can  only  hope 
that  Google  will  emerge  as  a  corporate  paragon  of  privacy  in  the  Web  3.0  age. 

The  truth  is  that  most  of  us  don't  want  to  share  everything  we  read, 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  171 


watch  and  listen  to  online.  Thus  innovations  in  the  marketplace  may  offer 
the  most  effective  defense  against  invidious  services  like  Facebook's  Open 
Graph  platform  which,  you'll  remember,  attempts  to  make  all  our  media 
choices  automatically  public  through  Mark  Zuckerberg's  "Frictionless  Shar- 
ing." After  the  updated  launch  of  Open  Graph  at  the  f8  Conference  in  Sep- 
tember 2011,  for  example,  a  number  of  third  party  developers  began  offering 
Facebook  users  a  way  of  retracting  sharing  from  the  Open  Graph,  with  news 
outlets  like  The  Washington  Post,  The  Guardian,  The  Wall  Street  Journal 
and  The  Independent  also  testing  ways  to  enable  their  readers  to  mute  Fric- 
tionless Sharing. '^^  And  the  music  subscription  service  Spotify  has  done  the 
same  thing,  adding  the  much  needed  "private  listening"  mode  after  some  of 
its  Facebook  users  complained  about  Frictionless  Sharing.^^ 

In  addition  to  the  market,  technology  itself  also  offers  the  consumer  a 
counter  to  what  sometimes  seems  like  the  perfect  memory  of  big  data  com- 
panies. According  to  The  New  York  Times'  Paul  Sullivan  and  Nick  Bilton, 
the  Internet  "is  like  an  elephant"^^  that  "never  forgets"^^ — making  it  analo- 
gous to  "S,"  the  early  twentieth-century  Russian  journalist  described  by 
Joshua  Foer  in  Moonwalking  with  Einstein,  as  a  man  who,  quite  literally,  re- 
membered everything."*"^  But  Bilton  and  Sullivan  are  mistaken.  The  Internet 
doesn't  have  to  be  "S."  Like  the  walls  of  the  Oxford  Union  library,  it  is  ac- 
tually quite  capable  of  forgetting.  Not  only  is  EU  justice  commissioner 
Viviane  Reding  trying  to  legislate  forgetting  into  law,  but  a  couple  of  recent 
technological  innovations  offer  hope  that  the  Internet  can,  indeed,  learn 
how  to  forget.  German  researchers  at  Saarland  University,  for  example,  have 
developed  software  called  X-Pire  which,  according  to  the  BBC,  "gives  im- 
ages an  expiration  date  by  tagging  them  with  an  encryption  key."  X-Pire  is 
designed  for  those  people  who,  in  the  words  of  Professor  Michael  Backes,  of 
Saarland's  Information  Security  and  Crytography  department,  "join  social 
networks  because  of  social  pressure  . . .  [and]  tend  to  post  everything  on  the 
first  day  and  make  themselves  naked  on  the  Internet."^^ 


172  ANDREW  KEEN 

The  BBC  also  reports  that  researchers  at  the  University  of  Twente  in  the 
Netherlands  are  working  on  technology  that  will  allow  data  to  degrade  over 
time.  This  work,  carried  out  by  the  university's  Center  for  Telematics  and 
Information  Technology,  is  designed  to  make  data  impermanent.  Over  time, 
for  example,  location  data  would  become  vaguer  and  vaguer,  shifting  from 
a  street  address  to  a  neighborhood  and  to  a  town  and  then  to  a  region.  "You 
can  slowly  replace  details  with  a  more  general  value,"  explains  the  project 
director,  Dr.  Harold  van  Heerde,  thus  guaranteeing — at  least  in  the  long 
run — that  one's  data  will  remain  private.  I'm  not  arguing  that  the  Internet 
should  become  like  "EP,"  an  eighty-four-year-old  brain-damaged  lab  tech- 
nician whom  memory  expert  Joshua  Foer  describes  as  the  "most  forgetful 
man  in  the  world.""*^  But  an  architecture  of  absolute  forgetting  is  no  more 
human  than  one  that  remembers  everything.  So  if  the  Internet  really  is  to  be 
our  twenty-first-century  home,  then  we  need  to  humanize  it  so  that  it  exists 
as  a  compromise  between  the  perfect  memory  of  "S"  and  "E.  P."'s  nonexis- 
tent one. 

And  if  none  of  these  cures  work,  there  is  always  the  Web  2.0  Suicide 
Machine,  another  technology  of  forgetting  developed  in  the  Netherlands. 
In  contrast,  however,  with  degrading  data  over  time  or  giving  it  an  expiration 
date,  the  Web  2.0  Suicide  Machine  kills  all  your  social  network  data  with  a 
single  software  bomb.  It's  the  nuclear  option  that  enables  you  to  totally 
"erase  your  virtual  life."^^ 

"Wanna  meet  your  real  neighbors  again?"  the  Web  2.0  Suicide  Machine 
asks^^  in  a  drastic  version  of  Nextdoor.com.  But  the  truth  is  that  the  nuclear 
option  of  the  Web  2.0  Suicide  Machine  isn't  a  serious  one  in  today's  Web  3.0 
world,  even  for  super  nodes  like  Robert  Scoble  who  have  never  met  their 
neighbors.  Rather  than  erasing  our  virtual  life,  we  need  to  manage  it. 
Rather  than  killing  our  thousands  of  online  friends  with  the  click  of  a  Web 
suicide  button,  we  need  to  shrink  them  down  to  a  manageable  number  so 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  173 

that  they  become  genuinely  intimate  friends  rather  than  just  data  points  in 
our  narcissistic  hall  of  mirrors. 

After  all,  how  many  complex  relationships  can  one  person  really  maintain? 

A  Pipe  of  Crystal  Meth 

According  to  the  executive  editor  of  The  New  York  Times,  friendship  has 
become  a  kind  of  drug  on  the  Internet,  the  crack  cocaine  of  our  digital  age. 
"Last  week,  my  wife  and  I  told  our  13 -year-old  daughter  she  could  join  Face- 
book,"  confessed  The  New  York  Times' Will  Keller  in  May  2011.  "Within  a 
few  hours  she  had  accumulated  171  friends,  and  I  felt  a  little  as  if  I  had  passed 
my  child  a  pipe  of  crystal  meth."'^^ 

A  June  2011  Pew  Research  Center  study  of  over  two  thousand  Ameri- 
cans reported  that  electronically  networked  people  like  Keller's  daughter 
saw  themselves  as  having  more  "close  friends"  than  those  of  us — those  "weirdo 
outcasts"  according  to  one  particularly  vapid  social  media  commentator^^ — 
who  aren't  on  Facebook  or  Twitter.  The  Pew  report  found  that  the  typical 
Facebook  user  has  229  friends  (including  an  average  of  7  percent  that  they 
hadn't  actually  met^^)  on  Mark  Zuckerberg's  network  and  has  more  "close 
relationships"  than  the  average  American.^^ 

But  this  June  2011  Pew  study  made  no  attempt  to  define  or  calibrate  the 
idea  of  "friendship,"  treating  each  one  quantatively,  like  a  notch  on  a  bed- 
post, and  presenting  Facebook  and  Twitter  as,  quite  literally,  the  architects 
of  our  intimacies.  What  this  survey  failed  to  acknowledge  is  that  human 
beings  aren't  simply  computers,  silicon  powered  devices  with  infinitely  ex- 
pandable hard  drives  and  memories,  who  can  make  more  friends  as  a  result 
of  becoming  more  and  more  networked. 

So  how  many  real  friends  should  we  have?  And  is  there  a  ceiling  to  the 
number  of  friendships  that  we  actually  can  have? 

A  couple  of  miles  north  of  the  Oxford  Mai  hotel  sits  the  gray-bricked 


ANDREW  KEEN 


home  of  Oxford  University's  Institute  of  Cognitive  and  Evolutionary  An- 
thology. It  is  here,  in  the  nondescript  academic  setting  of  a  north  Oxford 
suburb,  that  we  find  a  man  who  has  determined  how  many  friends  we  really 
need.  Professor  Robin  Dunbar,  the  director  of  this  institute,  is  an  anthro- 
pologist, evolutionary  psychologist  and  authority  on  the  behavior  of 
primates,  the  biological  order  that  includes  monkeys,  apes  and  humans. 
And  he  has  become  a  social  media  theorist  too,  best  known  for  formulating 
a  theory  of  friendship  dubbed  "Dunbar's  Number." 

"The  big  social  revolution  in  the  last  few  years  has  not  been  some  great  po- 
litical event,  but  the  way  our  social  world  has  been  redefined  by  social  network- 
ing sites  like  Facebook,  MySpace  and  Bebo,"  Dunbar  explains  his  eponymous 
number.^^  This  social  revolution,  he  says,  attempts  to  break  through  "the 
constraints  of  time  and  geography"  to  enable  uber-connected  primates  like 
@scobleizer  to  establish  online  friendships  with  tens  of  thousands  of  other 
wired  primates. 

"So  why  do  primates  have  such  big  brains?"^'^  Dunbar  asks,  rhetori- 
cally. Their  large  brains,  he  says,  borrowing  from  a  theory  known  as  the 
"Machiavellian  intelligence  hypothesis,"  are  the  result  of  "the  complex  so- 
cial world  in  which  primates  live."  It's  the  "complexity  of  their  social  rela- 
tions" defined  by  their  "tangled"  and  "interdependent"  personal  intimacies, 
Dunbar  argues,  that  distinguishes  primates  from  every  other  animal.^^  And 
as  the  most  successful  and  widely  distributed  member  of  the  primate  order, 
he  goes  on,  humans  brains  have  evolved  most  fully  of  all  because  of  the  intri- 
cate complexity  of  our  "intense  social  bonds." 

Memory  and  forgetting  are  the  keys  to  Dunbar's  theory  about  human 
sociability.  You'll  remember  that  The  New  York  Times'  Paul  Sullivan  sug- 
gested that  the  Internet  is  "like  an  elephant"  because  it  never  forgets.  But 
what  really  distinguishes  animals  like  elephants  from  primates,  Robin  Dun- 
bar explains,  is  that  they  "use  their  knowledge  about  the  social  world  in 
which  they  live  to  form  more  complex  alliances  with  each  other  than  other 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  175 


animals."^^  Thus  primates  have  a  lot  more  to  remember  about  our  social  in- 
timacies than  elephants — which  may  be  one  reason  why  humans  forget 
things  and  elephants  supposedly  don't. 

For  better  or  worse,  nature  hasn't  come  up  with  a  version  of  Moore's  Law 
that  could  double  the  size  and  memory  capacity  of  our  brain  every  two  years. 
Thus,  while  our  big  brains  are  the  result  of  our  complex  social  relationships, 
they  are  still  confined  by  their  limited  memories.  And  it's  our  biological  in- 
ability to  remember  the  intricate  social  details  of  large  communities,  Robin 
Dunbar  explains,  that  limits  our  ability  to  make  intimate  friendships. 

"We  can  only  remember  150  individuals,"  Dunbar  says,  "or  only  keep 
track  of  all  the  relationships  involved  in  a  community  of  150."  That  is  Dun- 
bar's Number — our  optimal  social  circle,  for  which  we,  as  a  species,  are 
wired.  From  traditional  academic  and  military  communities  to  those  "oral" 
villages  romanticized  by  nostalgic  McLuhanites,  Dunbar's  research  reveals 
that  the  optimal  number  of  complex  relationships  that  our  brains  can  effec- 
tively manage  has  stayed  the  same  throughout  human  history.  So  much,  then, 
for  Philip  Rosedale's  chiliastic  faith  in  the  unity  of  man.  Or  for  @quixotic's 
"liquid"  individual  able  to  build  vast  electronic  networks  of  friends. 

In  Cult  of  the  Amateur,  my  polemic  against  Web  2.0,  I  insulted  some 
thin-skinned  primates  by  comparing  bloggers  with  monkeys.  Rather  than 
monkeys,  however,  Web  3.0  might  be  turning  us  into  a  small-brained  spe- 
cies. Elephants  perhaps,  or  sheep,  or  even  swarms  of  insects.  That's  be- 
cause, as  Robin  Dunbar  argues,  "there  is  a  limit  to  the  number  of  people  we 
can  hold  a  particular  level  of  intimacy."^"  The  171  connections  "accumu- 
lated" by  Bill  Keller's  daughter  within  a  few  hours  of  her  joining  Facebook 
are,  therefore,  anything  but  "friends"  in  a  truly  primate  sense  and  they  do  no 
justice  to  either  her  highly  developed  brain  or  her  potential  as  a  member  of 
the  human  race  to  grasp  the  complexities  of  her  community. 

So  how  can  we  teach  this  social  complexity  to  the  Keller  girl?  What  is  the 
best  picture  we  can  show  her  of  genuine  human  friendship  and  intimacy? 


176  ANDREW  KEEN 

The  Best  Picture  of  2011 

Rather  than  government  legislation  or  new  laws,  the  best  cure  for  digital 
vertigo  might  be  to  watch  a  picture.  Or  two  motion  pictures,  to  be  exact. 

The  ideal  of  friendship  as  the  defining  quality  of  the  human  condition, 
rather  than  as  a  quantifiable  asset  to  be  aggregated,  was  demonstrated  at  the 
eighty-third  Academy  Awards  in  2011,  the  annual  Hollywood  awards  for 
the  best  movies  of  the  year.  Predictably  enough,  given  the  general  hysteria 
currently  surrounding  the  Web  3.0  revolution,  most  of  the  news  about  the 
2011  Oscars  had  been  about  social  media.  The  Wall  Street  Journal  described 
the  eighty-third  annual  Hollywood  gala  as  "The  socialized  and  appified  Os- 
cars" in  which  there  were  social  media  and  mobile  app  tie-ins  "up  the  wa- 
zoo"^^  While  on  Twitter,  there  were  1.2  million  tweets  produced  by  388,000 
users  during  the  three  hours  of  the  show's  live  television  airing.^^  But  social 
media  also  starred  in  the  2011  Oscar  content,  with  the  semifactual  story 
about  Mark  Zuckerberg's  controversial  founding  of  Facebook — the  David 
Fincher  produced  and  Aaron  Sorkin  written  The  Social  Network,  being  one 
of  the  two  most  popular  and  best  received  movies  of  the  year. 

The  Social  Network  features  many  of  the  characters  from  this  book  as 
semifictionalized  characters  in  the  story  of  Facebook 's  earliest  history  such 
as  the  social  media  revolution's  chief-rewiring-officer,  Mark  Zuckerberg  and 
Sean  Parker,  Facebook 's  one-time  president  and  the  co-founder  of  the  social 
video  network  Airtime.  There  are  also  minor  roles  for  Adam  D'Angelo,  the 
co-founder  of  the  social  knowledge  network  Quora,  and  for  the  original 
angel  investor  in  Facebook,  Peter  Thiel,  who  was  introduced  to  Parker  and 
Zuckerberg  by  our  old  friend,  @quixotic,  the  king  of  Silicon  Valley  con- 
nections. 

Based  on  Ben  Mezrich's  controversially  anecdotal  2009  hook  Accidental 
Billionaires,  Fincher  and  Sorkin's  picture  is  a  parable  about  friendship,  iden- 
tity and  betrayal  at  Facebook 's  birth  in  the  snowy  New  England  winter  of 
2003/2004.  As  the  big-brained  son  of  a  Jewish  dentist  from  New  Jersey, 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  177 

Zuckerberg  is  presented  as  an  outsider  in  Harvard's  complex  social  world, 
with  its  ancient  clubs,  opaque  customs  and  closed  networks  of  American 
aristocrats.  Professor  Robin  Dunbar,  the  director  of  Oxford  University's 
Institute  of  Cognitive  and  Evolutionary  Anthology,  tells  us  our  brains  have 
been  developed  to  grasp  the  complexity  of  Harvard's  social  arrangements, 
arguing  "what  keeps  a  community  together  is  a  sense  of  mutual  obligation 
and  reciprocity."  But  while  it  doesn't  doubt  the  size  of  Mark  Zuckerberg's 
brain.  The  Social  Network  presents  Zuckerberg  as  a  human  being  unable  or, 
perhaps,  unwilling  to  maintain  the  complex  social  obligations  and  reciproc- 
ity that  enable  us,  in  contrast  with  elephants,  to  develop  intimate  friend- 
ships with  other  primates. 

This  semifictionalized  Zuckerberg  in  Jhe  Social  Network  could  be  seen  as 
the  model  of  what  Georg  Simmel,  the  turn  of  the  twentieth  century  Ger- 
man sociologist,  identified  as  the  "individualism  of  difference"  that  defined 
modern  democratic  society.^^  Zuckerberg  has  no  sense,  none  whatsoever,  of 
social  obligation  or  reciprocity,  and  he  willfully  chooses  to  ignore  all  the 
complexity  and  secrecy  of  social  life  at  Harvard.  In  founding  Facebook,  a 
supposed  "social  network"  of  friends,  Zuckerberg  betrays  his  best  friend  and 
original  partner  who  originally  bankrolled  the  start-up,  humiliates  his  girl- 
friend online,  and  steals  the  business  idea  from  a  couple  of  other  under- 
graduates who  had  originally  paid  and  trusted  him  to  develop  their  Web 
site.  For  all  his  big-brained  technical  genius  and  business  savvy,  lonely  Zuck- 
erberg is  portrayed  as  a  friendless  computer  programmer  incapable  of  real 
social  relationships  who  betrayed  what  it  is  to  be  human.  Perhaps,  then,  it 
isn't  coincidental  that  this  socially  dysfunctional  programmer  founds  the 
dominant  social  network  of  the  early  twenty-first  century — the  company  at 
the  heart  of  our  Web  3.0  "like"  economy,  a  "personalized  community"  of 
almost  a  billion  discrete  individuals  all  alone  together  in  their  luxury  cells. 

As  it  happens,  the  other  illustrious  picture  of  2011  is  also  connected  to 
fi     some  other  characters  from  this  book.  You  will  remember  Bertie,  the  oldest 


178  ANDREW  KEEN 

son  of  Albert  and  Victoria,  whose  childhood  images  had  been  amongst  the 
private  etchings  at  the  source  of  the  Prince  Albert  v.  Strange  lawsuit  and 
who,  as  an  eighteen-year-old  undergraduate  at  Oxford  in  1859,  had  fre- 
quented Benjamin  Woodward's  Union  building  every  Thursday  afternoon. 
After  Queen  Victoria's  death  in  1901,  Bertie,  the  Prince  of  Wales,  was 
crowned  Edward  VII.  When  Bertie  died  in  1910,  his  son,  George  V,  became 
king.  And  therein  lies  the  origins  of  lOll's  other  major  picture,  Tom  Hoop- 
er's Jhe  King's  Speech. 

George  V  had  two  sons,  Edward  and  Albert  George  (known  to  his  loved 
ones  also  as  Bertie).  When  George  died  in  1936,  his  eldest  son  became  king, 
but  by  the  end  of  the  year  had  abdicated  the  throne  to  marry  an  American 
divorcee  called  Wallis  Simpson.  Jhe  King's  Speech  tells  the  story  of  Bertie, 
who  would  become  King  George  VI  on  his  brother's  sensational  abdication 
in  November  1936. 

Even  compared  with  Mark  Zuckerberg's  Harvard  in  the  winter  of 
2003/2004,  the  England  in  the  winter  of  1936/1937  was  an  intricately  com- 
plex society,  on  the  brink  of  war  with  Nazi  Germany  and  confronted  with 
one  of  the  most  serious  constitutional  crises  in  its  history.  Jhe  Kings  Speech 
is  a  movie  about  how  Bertie — who,  no  doubt,  had  a  smaller  brain  than  Mark 
Zuckerberg — successfully  navigated  this  complexity,  both  in  his  personal 
and  his  public  life. 

The  heart  of  Jhe  Kings  Speech  is  the  true  story  of  an  unlikely  yet  intimate 
friendship  between  the  aristocratic  Bertie  and  Lionel  Logue,  an  unqualified 
and  plebeian  Australian  voice  therapist.  Bertie's  secret — which  in  today's 
Web  3.0  world  would,  no  doubt,  be  tweeted  into  oblivion  by  the  social  me- 
dia mob — was  his  stutter,  which  disabled  him  from  making  public  speeches. 
The  greatness  of  Jhe  King's  Speech  lies  in  its  portrayal  of  the  emotionally  in- 
tense physical  meetings  between  the  future  George  VI  and  Logue,  both  the 
king  and  commoner  taking  care  to  remain  themselves  in  a  frighteningly 
complex  social  situation.  The  camera  lingers  on  the  two  men  as  they  build 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  179 

their  mutual  intimacy,  establishing  reciprocal  trust,  recognizing  each  oth- 
er's social  obligations,  demonstrating  loyalty  to  one  another,  arguing  and 
joking,  slowly  getting  to  like  and  then  love  one  another. 

The  2011  Academy  Awards  offered  us  the  choice,  as  best  movie  of  the 
year,  between  one  movie  about  betrayal  and  the  breakdown  of  human  rela- 
tionships, and  another  about  the  beauty  of  human  intimacy  and  friendship. 
The  Social  Network  is  about  a  friendless  billionaire  who  invented  the  "like" 
economy,  while  The  King's  Speech  is  about  a  loving  father,  husband  and  friend 
who  remained  true  to  himself  and  united  a  country.  And  that's  the  choice 
we  need  to  offer  Bill  Keller's  daughter:  The  choice  between  liking  and  lov- 
ing; the  choice  between  being  human  and  being  an  elephant  or  a  sheep. 

"There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  person  whose  real  self  you  like  every  particle 
of  This  is  why  a  world  of  liking  is  ultimately  a  lie,"  argues  the  novelist  Jona- 
than Franzen  in  a  passionate  attack  on  the  very  social  technology  that  en- 
abled Bill  Keller's  daughter  to  accumulate  171  friends  in  a  few  hours.  "But 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  a  person  whose  real  self  you  love  every  particle  of 
And  this  is  why  love  is  such  an  existential  threat  to  the  techno-consumerist 
order:  it  exposes  the  lie."*^^ 

Can  you  guess  which  movie  won  four  Oscars  at  the  eighty-third  Academy 
Awards  ceremony,  a  "coronation"  that  included  awards  for  best  director,  best 
actor  and  best  picture?^^ 


CONCLUSION:  THE  WOMAN  IN  BLUE 

"  'Take  care  to  remain  yourself  he  had  warned  me  so  long  ago.  I  wondered  if 
I  had  done  so.  It  was  not  always  easy  to  know. " 

—  TRACY  CHEVALIER,  GIRL  JVITH A  PEARL  EARRING 


Exorcising  Bentham 

In  conclusion,  we  need  to  return  to  the  beginning  of  this  story,  back  to  my 
vertiginous  encounter  in  London  with  Jeremy  Bentham's  corpse.  After  that 
giddy  experience  in  front  of  the  Auto-Icon,  I  needed  a  drink  or  two.  Tum- 
bling out  of  University  College  onto  Gower  Street — the  Bloomsbury  thor- 
oughfare where  Charles  Darwin  had  once  lived  and  where,  in  the  winter  of 
1848-49,  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood  had  been  founded^ — I  spied  a 
pub  in  an  adjacent  side  street.  Switching  on  my  BlackBerry  Bold  to  check 
the  time,  I  calculated  that  I  had  about  another  hour  to  myself  in  London — 
one  more  hour  of  freedom  in  the  soft  city  before  I  needed  to  leave  for  the 
airport  to  catch  my  flight  to  Amsterdam  where  I  was  to  speak  at  a  social 
media  conference  the  next  day. 

It  was  getting  dark  as  I  crossed  over  Gower  Street,  darting  between  the 
stream  of  black  taxis  and  red  double-decker  buses  heading  south  into  central 
London.  Tucking  my  hands  into  my  pockets,  I  walked  briskly  in  the  chill  of 
the  November  afternoon.  The  pub  was  on  University  Street,  no  more  than  a 
few  hundred  yards  from  Bentham's  Auto-Icon  in  the  South  Cloisters  corri- 
dor of  University  College.  As  I  got  closer,  I  saw  that,  like  most  London 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  181 

public  houses,  there  was  a  sign  hanging  high  above  its  door.  Designed  in  the 
shape  of  a  giant  pendant,  it  contained  an  image  of  an  old  man  with  beady 
eyes  and  shoulder-length  gray  hair.  In  spite  of  the  late  afternoon  gloom,  I  im- 
mediately recognized  him.  It  was  a  picture  of  Jeremy  Bentham,  from  whose 
corpse  I  had  been  fleeing. 

Named  The  Jeremy  Bentham,  the  pub  was  a  living  monument  to  the 
dead  social  reformer.  There  was  even  a  historic  black  plaque  on  a  wall  out- 
side the  pub's  front  door  boldly  enscribed  JEREMY  BENTHAM  that  be- 
gan with  a  description  of  his  illustrious  corpse  on  public  show  over  the  road 
in  University  College  and  ended  in  praise  of  his  utilitarian  philosophy: 

His  "Auto-Icon"  as  he  called  it,  is  in  fact  his  skeleton,  dressed  in  his  own 
clothes  and  topped  with  a  wax  model  of  his  head.  His  actual  head  is 
mummified  and  kept  in  the  college  vaults.  It  is  brought  out  for  meetings 
of  the  college  council  and  he  is  recorded  as  being  present  hut  not  voting. 
Above  the  bar  can  be  seen  a  copy  of  the  wax  head,  made  by  students  at 
the  college.  In  renaming  the  pub  after  him,  we  are  reminded  of  his  great- 
est ideal,  "the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  numbers. " 

My  heart  sank.  Just  as  Scottie  Ferguson  couldn't  escape  Madeleine  El- 
ster's  corpse  in  Hitchcock's  Vertigo,  it  seemed  as  if  I  couldn't  get  away  from 
Jeremy  Bentham's  hypervisible  dead  body.  Rather  than  having  to  sit  at  the 
bar  and  stare  at  a  copy  of  Bentham's  wax  head  while  drinking  my  beer  and 
eating  my  potato  chips,  I  headed  up  a  winding  staircase  to  a  small  room  that 
mercifully  appeared  to  contain  no  mementos  of  the  Inspection-House  in- 
ventor. Nursing  a  pint  of  The  Jeremy  Bentham's  best  bitter  in  this  Bentham- 
Free  room,  I  contemplated  my  meeting  with  the  illustrious  corpse  earlier 
that  afternoon. 

History  really  was  repeating  itself,  I  realized.  The  simple  architecture  of 
Bentham's  Auto-Icon  reflected,  so  to  speak,  the  digital  narcissism  of  our 


182  ANDREW  KEEN 

social  media  world.  I  recognized  too  that  Bentham's  Utilitarian  ideals, 
particularly  his  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number  principle,  were 
little  different  from  the  ideals  of  contemporary  digital  visionaries  like  Mark 
Zuckerberg  whose  social  network,  you'll  remember,  is  developing  a  Gross 
Happiness  Index  to  quantify  global  sentiment.  It  occurred  to  me,  therefore, 
that  a  critique  of  Bentham  might  also  be  the  best  strategy  for  critiquing  to- 
day's social  network  revolution.  So  what  was  the  most  effective  way,  I  mused, 
to  demolish  the  principles  of  utilitarianism  that  are  as  corrosive  today  as 
they  were  in  the  nineteenth  century? 

And  how,  I  wondered,  taking  a  gulp  of  beer  and  glancing  around  the  room 
to  make  sure  there  were  no  wax  heads  hanging  on  any  of  its  walls,  could  I  exor- 
cise the  corpse  of  Jeremy  Bentham  from  my  mind? 

On  Digital  Liberty 

The  solution  came  to  me  halfway  through  my  second  pint  of  bitter.  As  with 
any  doctrinal  system,  I  realized,  the  most  effective  critiques  come  from 
those  who  were  once  apostles  of  the  creed.  My  mind  settled  on  a  man  who 
had  been  born  not  far  from  The  Jeremy  Bentham — on  Rodney  Terrace  in 
Pentonville,^  no  more  than  a  mile  or  two  east  of  Bloomsbury.  That  man  was 
John  Stuart  Mill,  the  most  influential  British  social  and  political  thinker  of 
the  nineteenth  century. 

You'll  remember  that  it  was  Mill,  once  "the  apostle  of  the  Benthamites,"^ 
who,  having  experienced  "a  crisis"  in  his  "mental  history,""^  turned  against 
his  legal  guardian  and  accused  him  of  being  a  "boy  to  the  last."  Mill  rejected 
Bentham's  interpretation  of  human  beings  as  simply  calculating  machines. 
Instead,  Mill  saw  our  identities  as  being  much  more  complex  and  unique, 
along  the  lines  of  the  noble  characters  in  The  King's  Speech,  defined  as  much 
by  our  love  and  generosity  of  spirit,  by  our  poetry  and  by  our  originality  and 
independence  of  thought,  as  by  the  maximization  of  our  pleasures  and  the 
minimalization  of  our  pain. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  183 


Having  been  born  in  1806  and  died  in  1873,  Mill's  life  paralleled  Brit- 
ain's industrial  revolution,  the  technological  upheaval  that  replaced  the  tra- 
ditional society  of  village  life  with  the  connected  architecture  of  urban, 
mass  society.  Like  today,  it  was  a  revolutionary  world  defined  by  the  technol- 
ogy of  connectivity — an  "age  of  smoke  and  steam"  in  the  words  of  the  eco- 
nomic historian  Eric  Hobsbawn.  Between  1821  and  1848  in  the  UK,  for 
example,  railway  companies  laid  5,000  miles  of  track,  while  John  Loudon 
"tarmac"  McAdam's  innovative  technology  for  road  building,  developed  in 
1823,  had  given  Britain  the  best  road  system  seen  in  the  world  since  the 
Roman  Empire.  "This  new  world  would  need  new  thinkers,"  Mill's  biogra- 
pher, Richard  Reeves  explains,  "and  Mill  was  determined  to  be  one  of  the 
foremost  among  them."^ 

There  were  two  reasons  why  Mill  became  Britain's  foremost  thinker 
about  this  new  connected  world.  The  first  was  his  realism.  He  recognized 
that,  for  better  or  worse,  the  industrial  revolution  was  inevitable  and  thus 
regarded  cultural  conservatives  such  as  the  Pre-Raphaelites,  who  romanti- 
cized the  preindustrial  past,  as  "chaining  themselves  to  the  inanimate  corpses 
of  dead  political  and  religious  systems."^  Nor,  however,  did  he  fall  into  the 
Marxist  trap  and  glorify  this  new  technology  of  connectivity,  imagining 
that  it  would  eventually  enable  an  everlasting  unity  of  man.  So  while  he  was 
concerned  throughout  his  life  with  the  suffering  of  the  new  industrial  work- 
ing class  and  recognized  that  government  had  an  important  role  to  play  in 
society,  Mill  never  was  seduced  by  the  utopianism  that  coerced  many  of  his 
progressive  contemporaries. 

However,  what  most  distinguishes  Mill's  thought  and  makes  him  Brit- 
ain's most  important  nineteenth-century  social  and  political  thinker,  lies  in 
his  understanding  of  how  this  new  connected  world  impacted  the  auton- 
omy of  the  individual.  Utilitarians  like  Bentham  were  preoccupied  with  the 
rights  of  all  individuals,^  but  Mill  recognized  that  the  new  architecture  of 
connected  roads,  railways  and  newspapers  was  creating  a  mass  society  that 


184  ANDREW  KEEN 

endangered  the  most  valuable  thing  of  all  in  any  society — the  ability  of  indi- 
viduals to  think  and  act  for  themselves,  independently  of  public  opinion. 
Mill  laid  out  this  critique  of  mass  society  in  his  1859  classic  On  Liberty. 
What  Mill  most  feared  in  this  connected  industrial  world  was  "the  creative 
mediocrity"  of  popular  tastes,  habits  and  opinions.  "Men  are  not  sheep,"^  he 
wrote,  arguing  that  modern  government  has  a  responsibility  to  protect  not 
so  much  man  from  himself,  but  individuals  from  the  tyranny  of  public  opin- 
ion. We  should  be  able  to  do  what  we  like,  he  thus  famously  insisted,  as  long 
as  our  actions  didn't  harm  anyone  else.  If  Bentham's  creed  was  "the  greatest 
happiness  of  the  greatest  numbers,"  Mill's  faith  lay  in  individuals  avoiding 
being  corrupted  by  the  conformity  of  the  newly  networked  masses  and  re- 
maining true  to  themselves.  To  Mill,  therefore,  individual  autonomy,  pri- 
vacy and  self-development  were  all  essential  both  to  human  progress  and  to 
the  development  of  a  good  life. 

As  I  sat  upstairs  in  The  Jeremy  Bentham  nursing  my  beer  and  thinking 
about  John  Stuart  Mill,  what  struck  me  is  how  acutely  relevant  On  Liberty  is 
today,  in  an  age  also  being  revolutionized  by  a  pervasive  connective  technol- 
ogy. This  is  a  world,  according  to  Mark  Zuckerberg,  in  which  education, 
commerce,  health  and  finance  are  all  becoming  social.^  It's  a  connected  world 
defined  by  billions  of  "smart"  devices,  by  real-time  lynch  mobs,  by  tens  of 
thousands  of  people  broadcasting  details  of  a  stranger's  sex  life,  by  the  bu- 
reaucratization of  friendship,  by  the  group-think  of  small  brothers,  by  the 
elimination  of  loneliness,  and  by  the  transformation  of  life  itself  into  a  vol- 
untary Truman  Show. 

Most  of  all,  it's  a  world  in  which  many  of  us  have  forgotten  what  it  means 
to  be  human.  "But  here  I  fear  I  am  becoming  nostalgic,"  writes  the  novelist 
Zadie  Smith,  who  along  with  Jonathan  Franzen  and  Gary  Shteyngart  is 
amongst  the  most  articulate  contemporary  critics  of  social  media.  "I  am 
dreaming  of  a  Web  that  caters  to  a  person  who  no  longer  exists.  A  private 
person,  a  person  who  is  a  mystery,  to  the  world  and — which  is  more 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  185 

important — to  herself.  Person  as  mystery:  This  idea  of  personhood  is  cer- 
tainly changing,  perhaps  has  already  changed."^^ 

What  Smith,  as  well  as  Franzen,  Shteyngart  and  all  the  other  critics  of 
our  increasingly  transparent  and  social  age  are  mourning  is  this  loss  of  the 
private  person,  the  disappearance  of  secrecy  and  mystery,  the  primacy  of 
like  over  love,  the  victory  of  Bentham's  utilitarianism  over  Mill's  individual 
liberty  and,  most  of  all,  the  collective  amnesia  about  what  it  really  means  to 
be  human.  It's  a  super-sad  true  love  story  in  which  we  are  forgetting  who 
we  really  are. 

As  I  thought  about  Zadie  Smith's  notion  of  what  it  means  to  be  human, 
I  felt  a  tingling  in  my  groin.  No,  I  wasn't  giddy  on  the  best  Jeremy  Bentham 
bitter.  It  was  my  BlackBerry  Bold  vibrating  insistently  in  my  pocket.  My 
hour  in  London  was  up,  the  smartphone — which  also  acted  as  my  watch,  my 
alarm  clock  and  my  diary — was  telling  me.  I  needed  to  go  to  the  airport. 
Amsterdam  and  the  Rijksmuseum  awaited  me. 

Social  Pictures 

Mark  Zuckerberg  once  had  a  problem  with  pictures.  As  an  undergraduate  at 
Harvard,  he  enrolled  in  an  Art  History  class.  But  he  had  no  time  to  study  or 
attend  any  of  the  lectures  because  he  was  building  The  Facebook  (as  it  was 
then  known).  So  a  week  before  the  final  exam,  he  started  to  panic.  Zucker- 
berg knew  nothing  about  either  the  paintings  or  the  artists  in  the  course.  So, 
inevitably,  he  came  up  with  a  social  solution  to  his  dilemma. 

"Zuckerberg  did  what  comes  naturally  to  a  native  of  the  web.  He  went  to 
the  internet  and  downloaded  images  of  all  the  pieces  of  art  he  knew  would 
be  covered  in  the  exam,"  explains  Jeff  Jarvis,  who  got  the  story  firsthand 
from  the  then  twenty-two-year-old  Zuckerberg  when  they  met  at  the  2007 
World  Economic  Forum  in  Davos.  "He  put  them  on  a  Web  page  and  added 
blank  boxes  under  each.  Then  he  emailed  the  address  of  this  page  to  his 
classmates,  telling  them  he'd  just  put  up  a  study  guide The  class  dutifully 


186  ANDREW  KEEN 

came  along  and  filled  in  the  blanks  with  the  essential  knowledge  about  each 
piece  of  art,  editing  each  other  as  they  went,  collaborating  to  get  it  just 
right."ii 

I've  sometimes  wondered  which  artists  Zuckerberg  was  studying  for  his 
art  history  course.  The  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  perhaps,  with  their 
nostalgia  for  a  world  that  never  existed.  Or  nineteenth-century  landscape 
painters  like  Albert  Bierstadt,  with  their  dramatic  western  vistas  of  unlim- 
ited power.  Or  maybe  Johannes  Vermeer  and  Rembrandt  Van  Rijn,  the  two 
geniuses  of  seventeenth-century  Dutch  art  who,  in  their  different  ways,  were 
masters  of  reminding  us  who  we  really  are.  Perhaps  the  utilitarian  Zucker- 
berg, the  accidental  billionaire  who  believes  that  the  social  can  make  us  all 
more  efficient  and  happy,  downloaded  paintings  by  Vermeer  and  Rem- 
brandt. Maybe  he  even  had  these  pictures  up  on  his  screen  while  he  was 
hacking  the  Harvard  university  databases  to  launch  The  Facebook. 

What  particularly  intrigues  me  are  the  blank  boxes  that  Zuckerberg,  in 
this  social  art  experiment,  put  underneath  the  pictures.  These  boxes  were 
for  the  "essential  knowledge"  about  these  paintings,  suggesting  that  they,  like 
programming,  have  right  and  wrong  answers.  I  wonder  what  Zuckerberg 
would  have  written  about  Rembrandt's  self-portraits,  especially  his  self- 
portrait  of  himself  as  an  old  man,  when  he  represented  himself  as  the  Apostle 
Paul.  What  is  the  truth,  the  "essential  knowledge,"  about  these  pictures, 
that  he  would  have  entered  into  the  blank  box?  You  see,  the  essential  knowl- 
edge about  any  pictures,  particularly  if  they  have  anything  essential  about 
them,  is  that  their  mystery  and  secrecy  are  much  more  interesting  than  their 
answers.  The  truth  about  these  pictures  is  that  their  meaning  can't  be  so- 
cially fitted,  like  a  Facebook  update,  into  blank  boxes  on  computer  screens. 
The  essential  knowledge  about  any  great  picture — whether  they  have  been 
created  by  Vermeer  or  Rembrandt  or  even  by  Hitchcock — is  that  they  re- 
mind us  who  we,  as  human-beings,  really  are. 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  187 

The  Woman  in  Blue 

Portraits — particularly  self-portraits — happened  to  be  on  my  mind.  It  was 
the  morning  after  my  social  media  speech  in  Amsterdam  and  I  found  my- 
self in  the  Rijksmuseum,  the  museum  that  housed  some  of  the  most  illustri- 
ous Dutch  pictures  from  the  seventeenth  century.  My  BlackBerry  Bold  was 
switched  off,  buried  deeply  in  my  pocket.  I  was  thus  untethered  from  my 
Research  in  Motion  gadget,  disconnected  from  my  followers,  off  the  global 
network.  I  had  no  networked  camera,  no  access  to  existential  tweets,  no  Face- 
book  or  Linkedin  updates,  no  facial-recognition  technology,  no  Tweetie  ask- 
ing for  permission  to  reveal  my  location.  The  great  exhibitionism  of  the  early 
twenty-first  century  had,  for  a  couple  of  hours,  been  replaced  by  a  greater  ex- 
hibition of  seventeenth-century  Dutch  art. 

Christine  Rosen  writes  about  the  "painted  anthropology"  of  pictures: 
"For  centuries,  the  rich  and  the  powerful  documented  their  existence  and 
their  status  through  painted  portraits.  A  marker  of  wealth  and  a  bid  for  im- 
mortality, portraits  offer  intriguing  hints  about  the  daily  life  of  their 
subjects — professions,  ambitions,  attitudes  and  most  importantly,  social 
standing,"  she  notes.  ^^  Today,  Rosen  explains,  with  reference  to  social  net- 
working Web  sites  like  Facebook,  our  portraits  are  "democratic  and  digital; 
they  are  crafted  from  pixels  rather  than  paints."^^  But  it  hasn't  always  been 
this  way,  she  reminds  us.  Once,  portraits  were  universal  statements  rather 
than  forms  of  narcissism;  once  they  spoke  to  human  beings  collectively, 
rather  than  in  the  personalized  language  of  today's  social  media. 

At  the  Rijksmuseum,  I  had  just  finished  gazing  at  two  self-portraits  by 
Rembrandt:  one  as  a  hubristic,  red-haired  youngster  when  the  artist  was  no 
older  than  Mark  Zuckerberg;  the  other  as  a  weary  old  man  distinguished  by 
what  the  historian  Simon  Schama  calls  "Rembrandt's  Eyes,"  when  the  artist, 
whose  fortunes  by  then  had  dramatically  declined,  painted  himself  as  a 
wizened  Apostle  Paul.  In  spite  of  their  deeply  personal  nature,  both  pictures 
are  universal  statements,  "essential  knowledge,"  about  the  confidence  of 


188  ANDREW  KEEN 

youth  and  the  all-too-human  exhaustion  of  old  age.  That's  why,  almost  four 
hundred  years  later,  I  was  standing  in  the  Rijksmuseum  gazing  with  wonder 
at  pictures  that  were,  to  borrow  some  words  from  Christine  Rosen,  both  a 
bid  for  immortality  and  a  painted  anthropology  of  seventeenth-century 
Dutch  individualistic  culture. 

And  then  I  saw  her.  I  saw  the  woman  who  is  anything  but  her  own  image. 
I  saw  a  picture  of  who  we  really  are. 

Painted  by  Johannes  Vermeer  between  1663  and  1664,  "Woman  in  Blue 
Reading  a  Letter"  is  a  picture  of  a  young  Dutch  woman,  probably  pregnant, 
raptly  reading  an  unfolded  letter  that  she  is  holding  in  both  her  hands. 
There  is  a  map  on  the  rear  wall  behind  her,  an  open  box  in  front  of  her  and 
an  empty  chair  in  the  foreground.  These  are  all  universal  symbols  of  loss, 
opportunity  and  travel — Vermeer's  clues,  his  time  line,  to  making  sense  of 
the  picture.  The  room  is  well  lit,  but  we  see  no  window,  no  source  for  what 
appears  to  be  natural  light.  The  young  woman  is  so  locked,  so  imprisoned  in 
her  own  world,  gripping  the  letter  between  her  hands,  that  she  is  unaware  of 
anyone  else  watching  her. 

Watching  the  "Woman  in  Blue"  is,  of  course,  an  act  of  the  purest  voyeur- 
ism. I  knew  nothing  and  yet  everything  about  her.  Her  concentration  mes- 
merized me.  The  letter,  I  saw,  could  be  full  of  news  about  a  death  or  a  birth, 
it  could  be  from  an  old  friend,  a  sick  parent  or  a  new  love.  But  the  longer  I 
stared  at  her,  the  more  secretive,  the  more  private  the  picture  became  and 
the  more  relevant,  the  more  pressing,  the  more  eternal  and  the  more  myste- 
rious the  letter  in  her  hands  appeared. 

There  is  a  scene  in  Hitchcock's  Vertigo  when  Scottie  Ferguson  first  sees 
Madeleine  Elster.  They  are  in  Ernie's,  the  plush  old  steakhouse  in  San  Fran- 
cisco's North  Beach.  Scottie  is  sitting  at  the  bar  drinking  a  martini  and  Mad- 
eleine is  eating  dinner.  He  notices  her  through  a  doorway  as  she  walks  toward 
him.  She  is  dressed  in  a  green  shawl  and  a  low-cut  black  dress.  The  violins  in 
Bernard  Herrmann's  score  crescendo.  Scottie,  the  poor  fool,  is  immediately 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  189 

hooked.  And  so  are  viewers  like  myself.  I've  even  captured  this  image  of 
Madeleine  on  my  Twitter  (@ajkeen)  page.^'*  It  is  now  the  wallpaper,  the  back- 
ground to  all  my  tweets. 

It  was  a  little  like  this  at  the  Rijksmuseum  that  November  morning  when 
I  saw  Vermeer's  "Woman  in  Blue."  I  sat  in  front  of  the  picture  in  the  same 
frozen  pose  that  Madeleine  sat  in  front  of  the  painting  of  her  nineteenth- 
century  relative  in  the  San  Francisco  Palace  of  Fine  Arts.  Unlike  Madeleine, 
however,  my  infatuation  with  the  picture  was  neither  an  act  nor  a  ploy  to 
mislead  my  audience.  I  really  was  staring  into  it  raptly,  with  all  my  concen- 
tration focused  on  its  unresolvable  mysteries.  The  picture  had  become  the 
architecture  of  all  my  intimacies.  It  had  even  exorcised  the  corpse  of  Jeremy 
Bentham  from  my  mind. 

It  would  be  easy,  of  course,  to  make  a  conservative,  comfortably  nostal- 
gic argument  about  how  twenty-first-century  technology,  Christine  Rosen's 
digital  pixels,  disables  us  from  the  production  of  such  pictures  today.  "Yes,  I 
should  have  liked  to  have  lived  there  then,  color,  excitement,  power,  freedom," 
as  that  villainous  Gavin  Elster  said,  so  disingenuously  about  the  supposed 
idyll  of  mid-nineteenth-century  San  Francisco.  But,  as  John  Stuart  Mill, 
who  never  enrolled  in  the  "Jeremiah  School"^^  reminds  us,  it  is  stupid  to 
chain  ourselves  to  dead  political  or  social  systems  in  order  to  denigrate  the 
present.  Besides  as  I've  already  argued,  such  a  technocentric  analysis  is  the 
Macguffin  in  this  book.  The  truth  is  that  Johannes  Vermeer,  who  was  as 
much  a  technophile  as  any  twenty-first-century  geek,  focused  on  using  all  the 
most  sophisticated  technologies  of  his  age  to  make  his  pictures  more  realis- 
tic. Indeed,  as  Philip  Steadman  argues  in  Vermeer's  Camera:  Uncovering  the 
Truth  Behind  the  Masterpieces,  Vermeer's  knowledge  of  seventeenth-century 
optical  science  enabled  him  to  build  a  "camera  obscura,"  a  primitive  version  of 
the  modern  camera,  which  enabled  him  to  capture  the  subjects  of  his  pic- 
tures with  more  photographic  accuracy. ^^ 

To  borrow  some  words  from  Mark  Zuckerberg,  what  "essential  knowledge" 


190  ANDREW  KEEN 

does  "Woman  in  Blue"  teach  us?  What  is  the  truth  that  we  can  uncover  be- 
hind Vermeer's  masterpiece?  In  Tracy  Chevalier's  novel  Girl  with  a  Pearl 
Earring,  her  brilliant  reconstruction  of  the  story  behind  another  Vermeer 
masterpiece,  there  is  a  moment  when  the  story's  heroine,  a  young  maid 
called  Griet,  is  told  by  a  local  merchant  to  "take  care  to  remain  yourself."^'' 
And  this  was  exactly  what  "The  Woman  in  Blue"  had  remained.  We  know 
nothing  about  her  except  that  she  has  taken  care  to  remain  herself,  an  en- 
tirely private  being,  hyperinvisible,  a  mystery  to  the  world — the  person  that 
Zadie  Smith  fears  we  have  lost.  She  may  or  may  not  be  John  Stuart  Mill's 
"unique  individual,"  but  she  does  represent  the  condition  for  Mill's  defini- 
tion of  the  good  life,  somebody  left  to  their  own  devices,  autonomous,  not  a 
little  lonely  above  all,  private.  Her  authenticity  lies  in  her  mystery,  not  her 
nakedness.  "Woman  in  Blue"  is  an  image  of  herself  without  knowing  it — 
the  opposite  of  Jeremy  Bentham's  stuffed  corpse  gazing  with  such  unreflexive 
self-satisfaction  out  of  his  Auto-Icon,  the  reverse  of  mad  Josh  Harris  living 
in  the  fully  public  Quiet  hotel  or  the  shiny-faced  Robert  Scoble  hypervisibly 
sitting  in  front  of  his  flickering  computer  monitor  watching  his  followers 
watching  him. 

I  continued  to  sit  for  a  while,  mesmerized,  staring  at  "Woman  in  Blue."  I 
realized  that  this  timeless  picture  is  indeed  what  we  are  risking  losing.  In  the 
great  exhibitionism  of  our  hypervisible  Web  3.0  world,  when  we  are  always 
on  public  display,  forever  revealing  ourselves  to  the  camera,  we  are  losing  the 
ability  to  remain  ourselves. 

We  are  forgetting  who  we  really  are. 

Remaining  Ourselves 

After  a  while,  I  got  up  to  leave.  I  wandered  through  a  couple  of  small  rooms 
and  found  myself  standing  in  front  of  perhaps  the  most  famous  picture  in 
the  world,  Rembrandt  van  Rijn's  1642  painting  "The  Night  Watch,"  his  por- 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  191 

trait  of  a  group  of  Dutch  burghers.  First  I  looked  at  the  almost  400-year-old 
huge  painting  that  covered  an  entire  wall  of  the  museum  and  then  at  its  de- 
scription on  an  adjacent  wall: 

Rembrandt's  best  known  and  largest  canvas  was  made  for  the 
club  building  of  one  of  Amsterdam 's  militia  companies — the  ar- 
quebusiers.  Every  burgher  was  required  to  serve  in  the  guard  but 
those  included  in  a  group  portrait  had  to  pay  for  the  privilege,  it 
is  the  company's  wealthiest  members  who  are  shown  here.  Rem- 
brandt was  the  Brst  to  portray  subjects  in  a  portrait  in  motion. 

I  blinked  and  read  the  final  sentence  on  the  wall  again.  "Rembrandt  was 
the  first  to  portray  subjects  in  a  portrait  in  motion."  The  v^iy  first\  In  the 
full  span  of  human  history,  of  course,  400  years  isn't  a  long  time.  But  the 
almost  400  years  that  have  elapsed  between  Rembrandt's  "NightWatch" 
now — shaped  first  by  the  industrial  and  now  the  digital  revolutions — seem 
like  an  eternity.  In  our  transparent  age  of  global  communications,  when  we 
are  self- authoring  mankind's  collective  portrait  every  minute  of  the  day, 
where,  for  example,  during  the  Osama  Bin  Laden  assassination  on  May  1, 
2011,  there  were  3,440  tweets  about  Bin  Laden  2X!ix}cvoT^di per  second}^ — it  is 
difficult  to  imagine  a  time  when  group  portraits  in  motion  didn't  exist. 

I  tried  to  cast  my  mind  forward  not  400  years,  but  just  forty — to  the 
middle  of  the  twenty-first  century.  How  much  quicker  and  more  social,  I 
wondered,  could  our  group  portrait  in  motion  become?  At  Oxford,  in  an 
interview  for  a  BBC  show  that  I  was  making  about  the  future  of  technology, 
I  had  asked  Biz  Stone  if  our  communications  would  ever  become  faster  than 
real-time.  He  had  laughed,  in  his  geeky  cheeky  way,  at  the  absurdity  of  it. 
But  in  forty  years'  time,  I  wondered,  when  @quixotic's  Web  3.0  world  seems 
as  archaic  as  Rembrandt's  "The  Night  Watch"  or  Vermeer's  "Woman  in  Blue 


192  ANDREW  KEEN 

Reading  a  Letter,"  would  we  remain  ourselves?  Would  we  take  on  the  identity 
of  the  walls  of  Benjamin  Woodward's  Oxford  Union,  which  had  lost  every- 
thing that  had  been  painted  upon  them?  Could  we  really  forget  who  we  are? 
I  began  this  book  with  a  lively  corpse  from  the  past,  so  let  me  end  with  a 
haunting  corpse  from  the  future.  As  an  Oxford  undergraduate,  you'll  re- 
member, old  Jeremy  Bentham  was  scared  of  ghosts.  Indeed,  the  inventor  of 
the  Inspection-House  was  so  terrified  of  goblins  throughout  his  life  that  he 
was  scared  to  sleep  alone  at  night  and  required  his  assistants  to  share  his 
bedroom.  ^^  Unlike  Bentham,  I'm  scared  of  neither  ghosts  nor  goblins.  But  I 
have  to  confess  that  I  am  scared  of  the  ghost  of  mankind,  a  ghost  that  would 
have  forgotten  what  it  is  to  be  human.  This  ghost  would  be  living  hypervisi- 
bly  with  incalculable  followers,  associates  and  friends  on  every  social  net- 
work, past  and  future.  The  existence  of  this  ghost,  I  confess,  would  make 
me  scared  to  sleep  alone  at  night  too  and  would  require  my  assistant  to  sleep 
closely  beside  me. 

It  was,  I  think,  Alfred  Hitchcock  who  once  said  that  behind  every  good 
picture  lay  a  great  corpse.  But  mankind  isn't  a  picture  and  there  is  nothing 
good  about  a  species  that  has  turned  into  a  corpse  because  it  has  forgotten 
what  it  once  was.  John  Stuart  Mill,  Bentham's  greatest  nineteenth-century 
critic,  was  right  to  argue  that  remaining  human  required  us  to  sometimes 
disconnect  from  society,  to  remain  private,  autonomous  and  secretive.  The 
alternative.  Mill  recognized,  was  the  "tyranny  of  the  majority"  and  the 
death  of  individual  liberty.  This  isn't  an  unrealistic  fear.  As  Michael  Fou- 
cault,  Bentham's  most  creative  twentieth-century  critic,  warns  "man  is  neither 
the  oldest  nor  the  most  constant  problem  that  has  been  posed  for  human 
knowledge"  and  thus  he  could  easily  be  "erased,  like  a  face  drawn  in  at  the 
edge  of  the  sea.  ^^ 

Today,  more  than  150  years  afi:er  Mill  published  On  Liberty,  as  a  new, 
more  virulent  revolution  of  connectivity  rages  all  around  us  and  we  are  all 


DIGITAL  VERTIGO  193 

dizzily  broadcasting  ourselves  from  our  connected  crystal  palaces,  we  need 
to  go  back  to  the  anti-Bentham,  John  Stuart  Mill,  for  guidance.  Men  aren't 
sheep,  Mill  says.  Nor  are  they  armies  of  ants  or  herds  of  elephants.  No,  just 
as  @quixotic  is  wrong  to  believe  that  we  are  primarily  social  beings  and  Biz 
Stone  mistaken  that  the  future  must  be  social,  so  is  Sean  Parker  wrong  that 
today's  creepy  is  inevitably  tomorrow's  necessity.  Instead,  as  John  Stuart 
Mill  reminds  us,  our  uniqueness  as  a  species  lies  in  our  ability  to  stand  apart 
from  the  crowd,  to  disentangle  ourselves  from  society,  to  be  let  alone  and  to 
be  able  to  think  and  act  for  ourselves. 

The  future,  therefore,  should  be  anything  but  social.  That's  what  we  need 
to  remember  as  human  beings  at  the  dawn  of  the  twenty-first  century  when, 
for  better  or  worse,  @quixotic's  Web  3.0  world  of  pervasive  personal  data, 
this  Internet  of  people,  is  becoming  like  home  for  all  of  us.  And  that's  ex- 
actly the  "essential  knowledge"  that  I'd  like  you  to  take  away  from  this  pic- 
ture of  digital  vertigo  in  our  age  of  great  exhibitionism. 


ENDNOTES 


EPIGRAPH 

1.     W.  G.  Sebald,  Vertigo  ("New  Directions,  2000)  94-95. 

INTRODUCTION:   HYPERVISIBILITY 

1.  Alexia  Tsotsis,  October  30,  2010. 

2.  For  a  full  history  of  Bentham's  corpse,  see  the  James  E.  Crimmin's  introduction  to  Jeremy 
Bentham's  Auto-Icon  and  Related  Writings  (Bristol,  2002)  (http://www.utilitarian.net/ 
bentham/about/2002----.htm). 

3.  C.F.A.  Marmoy,  "The  Auto-Icon  of  Jeremy  Bentham  at  University  College,"  History 
of  Medicine  at  UCL  Journal,  April  1958  (http://www.ncbi.nlm.gov/pmc/articles/ 
PMC1034365/). 

4.  Aldous  Huxley,  Prisons  (Trianon  &  Grey  Falcon  Presses,  1949).  See:  http://www.john- 
coulthart.com/feuilleton/2006/08/25/aldous-huxley-on-piranesis-prisons/. 

5.  Bentham,  John  Dinwiddy,  (Oxford,  1989),  18. 

6.  Manufactured  by  the  appropriately  named  Research  in  Motion  (RIM),  Canada's  largest 
technology  company,  globally  headquartered  in  Waterlooville,  Ontario.  My  model  was 
the  BlackBerry  Bold. 

7.  A  Canon  Digital  Rebel  XSi  12.2  MP  Digital  SLR  Camera  with  an  EF-S  55-250mm  f/4- 
5.6  IS  zoom  lens. 

8.  "Infographic:  A  Look  at  the  Size  and  Shape  of  the  Geosocial  Universe  in  2011,"  by  Rip 
Empson,  Techcrunch,  May  20,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/20/infographic-a 
-look-at-the-size-and-shape-of-the-geosocial-universe-in-2011/). 

9.  See:  "An  Internet  of  People,"  by  Chris  Dixon,  cdixon.org,  December  19,  2011  (http:// 
cdixon.org/2011/12/19/an-internet-of-people/).  Dixon  quotes  the  Sequoia  venture  capi- 
talist Roelof  Botha,  who  describes  this  internet  of  people  as  a  "trust"  and  "reputation" 
economy. 

10.     "The  Daily  Dot  Wants  to  be  the  Web's  Hometown  Paper,"  by  Matthew  Ingram,  Gigaom, 


196  ENDNOTES 

April  1,  2011  (http://gigaom.com/2011/04/01/the-daily-dot-wants-to-be-the-webs-home- 
town-paper/). 

11.  For  forty  years  of  his  adult  life,  Bentham  lived  in  a  Westminster  house  overlooking  St. 
James  Park  that  he  called  Queen's  Square  Place.  Perhaps  not  uncoincidentally,  given  Ben- 
tham's  keen  interest  in  penal  reform,  this  Westminster  site,  known  today  as  102  Petty 
France,  is  occupied  by  the  British  Ministry  of  Justice. 

12.  Bentham's  "greatest  happiness  principle"  was  laid  out  in  his  1831  pamphlet  Parliamentary 
Candidate's  Proposed  Declaration  of  Principles  in  which  he  argued  that  the  goal  of  govern- 
ment is  to  maximize  the  pleasure  or  happiness  of  the  greatest  number.  (See:  Bentham, 
John  Dinwiddy,  Oxford,  Chapter  2,  "The  Greatest  Happiness  Principle.") 

13.  Richard  Florida,  The  Rise  of  the  Creative  Class,  (Basic,  2002),  74,  John  Hagel,  John  Seely 
Brown,  The  Power  of  Pull  (Basic  2010),  90. 

14.  "The  Metropolis  and  Mental  Life,"  by  Georg  Simmel,  from  The  Sociology  ofGeorgSimmel, 
ed.  Kurt  H.  WolfF(Free  Press,  1950),  409. 

15.  Jonathan  Raban,  Soft  City,  (15).  Raban  is  also  the  author  oi Surveillance  (Pantheon  2006), 
an  excellent  novel  about  the  growing  ubiquity  of  electronic  surveillance  in  our  digital  age. 

16.  "The  Ministry  of  Truth — Minitrue,  in  Newspeak — was  startingly  different  from  any 
other  object  in  sight,"  Orwell  described  the  Ministry  of  Truth  in  Nineteen  Eighty  four.  "It 
was  an  enormous  pyramidal  structure  of  glittering  white  concrete,  soaring  up,  terrace  af- 
ter terrace  three  hundred  m.etres  into  the  air.  From  where  Winston  stood  it  was  just  pos- 
sible to  read,  picked  out  on  its  white  face  in  elegant  lettering,  the  three  slogans  of  the 
Party:  WAR  IS  PEACE,  FREEDOM  IS  SLAVERY,  IGNORANCE  IS  STRENGTH. 

17.  Richard  Cree,  "Well  Connected,"  Director  magazine,  July  2009. 

18.  See  "Boom!  Professional  Social  Network  Linkedin  Passes  100  Million  Members,"  by 
Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  March  22,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/22/boom 
-professional-social-network-linkedin-passes-lOO-million-members/). 

19.  Laptop  Magazine,  February  201 1,  71. 

20.  "Linkedin  Founder:  "Web  3.0  Will  Be  About  Data,"  by  Ben  Parr,  Mashable,  March  30, 
2011.  For  a  video  of  Hoffman's  interview  with  Liz  Cannes  at  the  Web  20.  Expo,  see: 
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2011/public/schedule/detail/177l6. 

21.  The  other  four  are  Netscape  cofounder  Marc  Andreessen,  legendary  seed  investor  Ron 
Conway  and  Peter  Thiel,  Hoffman's  colleague  at  Paypal  and  the  founding  angel  investor 
in  Facebook.  See:  "The  25  Tech  Angels,  1 1  Good  Angels  and  18  Geeks  Everyone  Wants  to 
Fly  With,"  see  San  Francisco  Magazine,  December  2010.  (http://www.sanfranmag.com/ 
story/25-tech-angels-ll-good-angels-and-18-geeks-everyone-wants-fly-with). 

22.  "The  Midas  List:  Technology's  Top  100  Investors,"  Forbes,  April  6,  2011.  (http://www 
.forbes.com/lists/midas/2011/midas-list-complete-list.html). 

23.  "Reid  Hoffman,"  Soapbox,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  ]\int  23,  2011.  (http://online.wsj 
.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576363452101709880.html). 

24.  "The  King  of  Connections  Is  Tech's  Go-To-Guy,"  by  Evelyn  M.  Rush,  The  New  York 
Times,  November  5,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/ll/06/business/reid-hofF 
man-of-linkedin-has-become-the-go-to-guy-of-tech.html?pagewanted=all). 

25.  For  my  own  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch. tv  interview  with  Reid  Hoffman  in  August  2010,  see: 
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/keen-on-reid-hofFman-leadership/. 


ENDNOTES  197 

26.  "Fail  Fast  Advises  Linkedin  Founder  and  Tech  Investor  Reid  Hoffman,"  BBC,  January 
11,  2001  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12151752). 

27.  "Linkedin  Surpasses  MySpace  to  Become  No.  2  Social  Network,"  by  Leena  Rao,  Tech- 
crunch,  July  8,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com'/2011/07/08/linkedin-surpasses-myspace 
-for-u-s-visitors-to-become-no-2-social-network-twitter-not-far-behind/). 

28.  The  Linkedin  IPO  took  place  on  May  18,  201 1.  Beginning  the  day  priced  at  $40,  shares 
tripled  in  value  at  one  point  and  finally  ended  the  day  at  $94,  valuing  the  company  at  al- 
most $9  billion  and  giving  Hoffman  a  more  than  two  billion  dollar  stake  in  his  start-up. 
See:  "Linkedin's  Top  Backers  Own  $6.7  Billion  Stake,"  by  Ari  Levy,  Bloomberg  News, 
May  18, 2011.  (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-19/linkedin-s-founder-biggest 
-backers-wiIl-own-2-5-billion-stake-after-ipo.html).  See,  also:  "Small  Group  Rode  Linke- 
din to  a  Big  Payday,"  by  Nelson  D.  Schwartz,  The  New  York  Times,  June  19,2011.  (http:// 
www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/business/20bonanza.htmlPhp),  for  an  analysis  of  the 
IPO  and  how  "for  Reid  Hoffman,  the  chairman  of  Linkedin,  it  took  less  than  30  minutes 
to  earn  himself  an  extra  $200  million." 

29.  In  conversation  with  Liz  Cannes  of  All  Things  D,  December  29,  2010.  (http://network 
effect.allthingsd.com/20101229/video-greylocks-reid-hoffman-and-david-sze-on-the 
-future-of-social/). 

30.  Zygna — which  includes  the  massively  popular  social  game  Farmville  in  its  digital  stable — 
has  become  so  big  so  quickly  that  its  value  is  about  equal  to  that  of  Electronic  Cames  (EA), 
the  world's  second-largest  game  publisher.  According  to  research  published  by  SharesPost 
in  October  2010,  the  privately  held  Zygna  was  worth  $5.1  billion  while  the  publicly 
traded  EA  was  worth  $5.16  on  the  Nasdaq  Stock  Market.  For  more,  see  Bloomberg 
Businessweek  of  10/26/2010:  http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-26/zynga-s 
-value-tops-electronic-arts-on-virtual-goods.html. 

31.  Samuel  Warren  and  Louis  Brandeis,  "The  Right  to  Privacy,"  Harvard  Law  Review,  Vol. 
IV,  December  15,  1890,  No. 5.  This  article  has  been  described  as  "legendary"  and  "the  most 
influential  law  review  article  of  all"  and  is  considered  by  many  privacy  scholars  to  be  the 
foundation  of  privacy  law  in  the  United  States.  For  more,  see:  Daniel  J.  Solove,  Under- 
standing Privacy  (Harvard  University  Press,  2008),  13-18. 

32.  "One  time  prison  becoming  daring  escape,"  is  how  the  Malmaison  brands  itself  for  the 
modern  traveler  bored  with  traditional  luxury  hotels.  To  follow  the  Malmaison  on  Twit- 
ter, go  to:  http://twitter.eom/#I/TheOxfordMal. 

33.  Aristotle's  argument  from  The  Politics  that  "man  is  by  nature  a  social  animal:  an  individ- 
ual who  is  unsocial  naturally  and  not  accidentally  is  either  beneath  our  notice  or  more 
than  human.  Society  is  something  that  precedes  the  individual . . ."  is  the  opening  salvo  of 
a  two-thousand-year-old  communitarian  argument  that  places  the  importance  of  the  so- 
cial above  the  individual.  Aristotle's  position  that  "anyone  who  either  cannot  lead  the 
common  life  or  is  so  self-sufficient  as  not  to  need  to,  and  therefore  does  not  partake  of 
society,  is  either  a  beast  or  a  god"  was  entertainingly  countered  by  Friedrich  Nietzsche's 
maxim  from  Twilight  of  the  Idols  that  "in  order  to  live  alone,  one  must  be  an  animal  or  a 
Cod — says  Aristotle.  The  third  case  is  missing:  one  must  be  both — a  philosopher  . . ." 

34.  Sacca  runs  a  billion-dollar  social  media  investment  fund.  As  of  late  February  2010,  his 
Lowercase  Capital  billion  dollar  fund  (that  includes  JP  Morgan  as  a  major  investor)  was 


198  ENDNOTES 

the  largest  institutional  owner  of  Twitter  stock  with  a  roughly  9  percent  stake  in  the  real- 
time social  network.  See:  "New  Fund  Provides  Stake  in  Twitter  for  JP  Morgan,"  Evelyn 
Rush,  The  New  York  Times  Deal  Book,  February  28,  2011  (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/ 
2011/02/28/new-fund-gives-jpmorgan-a-stake-in-twitter/). 

35.  See:  http://andrewkeen.independentminds.livejournal.com/3676.html  for  an  account  of 
my  conversations  with  Stone  at  Oxford  as  well  as  a  photograph  of  the  tuxedoed  Stone  and 
FiofFman  in  the  Oxford  Union  library. 

36.  Oxford  Union  Debate,  Sunday,  November  23,  2008. 

37.  The  speed  of  Twitter's  market  value  is  astonishing.  In  October  2010,  the  privately  held 
company — which  still  remains  effectively  revenue-free — had  a  secondary  market  valua- 
tion of  $1,575  billion.  By  December  2010,  the  blue  chip  Silicon  Valley  venture  firm  of 
Kleiner  Perkins  led  a  $200  billion  investment  round  in  Twitter  at  a  valuation  of  $3.7  bil- 
lion. Then  in  February  201 1,  The  Wall  Street  Journal  announced  rumors  that  Google  and 
Facebook  were  interested  in  acquiring  Twitter  for  between  $8  and  $10  billion.  And  by 
March,  201 1,  Twitter's  valuation  on  the  secondary  market  has  risen  to  $7.7  billion.  While 
in  April  201 1,  Fortune  magazine  reported  that  Twitter  had  turned  down  a  $10  billion  ac- 
quisition offer  from  Google.  But  by  July,  Twitter  had  raised  another  $400  million  of  ven- 
ture capital  investment  at  a  $8  billion  valuation.  And  by  August  201 1,  the  Financial  Times 
confirmed  Twitter's  $8  billion  valuation  and  its  investment  led  by  the  Russian  internet 
investment  firm  DST. 

38.  "New  Twitter  Stats:  140M  Tweets  Sent  Per  Day,  460K  Accounts  Created  Per  Day,"  by 
Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  March  14,  2011.  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/l4/new 
-twitter^stats-140m-tweets-sent-per-day-460k-accounts-created-per-day/). 

39.  Before  Twitter,  Stone  was  an  executive  at  a  number  of  technology  companies  including 
Google.  His  books  include  Blogging:  Genius  Strategies  for  Instant  Web  Content  (2002) 
Who  Let  The  Blogs  Out:  A  Hyperconnected Peek  at  the  World  ofWeblogs  (2004). 

40.  In  June  2011,  Stone  retired  from  his  full-time  position  at  Twitter  as  "part  evangelist,  part 
storyteller,  and  part  futurist"  to  become  a  strategic  advisor  at  Spark  Capital.  See:  "Twitter 
Co-Founder  Joins  Venture  Capital  Firm,  by  Claire  Cain  Miller,"  The  New  York  Times, 
July  7,  2011  (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/twitter-co-founder-joins-venture 
-capital-firm/). 

41.  "Twitter  Founder  to  Join  Huffington  Post,"  by  Dominic  Rushe,  The  London  Guardian, 
March  15,  3011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/15/twitter-founder-joins 
-huffington-post). 

42.  "The  Auto-Icon  of  Jeremy  Bentham  at  University  College,  London"  by  C.F.A.  Marmoy, 
The  History  of  Medicine  at  UCL  Journal,  April  1958. 

43.  Bentham  become  John  Stuart  Mill's  legal  guardian  six  years  after  John's  birth  when  James 
Mill  fell  seriously  ill.  See:  Richard  Reeves,  John  Stuart  Mill:  Victorian  Firebrand  (Atlan- 
tic, 2007),  11. 

44.  "Bentham"  by  John  Stuart  Mill,  in  John  Stuart  Mill  and  Jeremy  Bentham:  Utilitarianism 
and  Other  Essays  (Penguin,  1987),  149. 

45.  Mill  popularized  the  term  "Utilitarian"  in  the  winter  of  1822-23  when  he  set  up  the 
"Utilitarian  Society"  (see:  J.  S.  Mill,  Autobiography,  49)  The  word  itself,  however,  unbe- 
known to  Mill,  had  first  been  used  by  Bentham  in  some  eighteenth-century  correspon- 


ENDNOTES  199 

dence  with  the  French  pohtical  theorist  Pierre  Etienne  Louis  Dumont  (see:  Richard  Reeves, 
John  Stuart  Mill),  ^7. 

46.  "Bentham,"byJ.S.  Mill,  149. 

47.  Umberto  Eco,  Travels  in  Hyperreality  (Harcourt,  Brace,  Jovanovich:  1983),  6-7. 

48.  Pierre  Boileau  and  TTiomas  Narcejac,  The  Living  and  the  Dead  (Washburn,  1957). 

49.  "Tracking  is  an  Assault  on  Liberty,"  by  Nicholas  Carr,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  August  7, 
2010. 

50.  "Soapbox:  Reid  Hoffman,"  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  June  23,  2011  (http://online.wsj 
.com/article/SB1000l424052702303657404576363452101709880.html). 

51.  "Fail  fast"  advises  Linkedin  founder  and  tech  investor  Reid  Hoff^man,"  BBC  Business 
News,  January  11,  2011  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12151752). 

52.  At  the  March  2011  South  by  Southwest  conference,  Hoff^man  laid  out  his  definition  of 
Web  3.0.  If  Web  1.0  meant  "go  search,  get  data",  and  Web  2.0  meant  "real  identities"  and 
"real  relationships,"  Hoff^man  said,  then  Web  3.0  involves  "real  identities  generating  mas- 
sive amounts  of  data."  See:  "Linkedln's  Reid  Hoff^man  explains  the  brave  new  world  of 
data,"byAnthonyHa,March  15, 201  LVentureBeat.  (http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/15/ 
reid-hoffman-data-sxsw/) 

53.  Estimate  by  Cisco  (http://www.electrictv.com/?p=4323).  See  also  the  remarks  of 
Ericsson  CEO  and  President  Hans  Vestberg  at  the  Monaco  Media  Forum  in  November 
2010  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTT-WvelWWo).  But  even  in  the  very 
short  term,  it  is  inevitable  that  the  number  of  connected  people  and  devices  will  rise 
dramatically.  At  the  Feburary  2011  Mobile  World  Congress  in  Barcelona,  for  example, 
Nokia  CEO  Stephen  Elop  promised  to  "connect  the  unconnected"  and  bring  three  mil- 
lion people  around  the  world  online  via  their  cellphones.  See:  "Nokia  Wants  to  Bring  3 
Billion  More  Online,"  by  Jenna  Wortham,  7??^'  New  York  Times,  February  18,  2011 
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/l6/nokia-wants-to-bring-3-billion-more 
-online/). 

1.  A  SIMPLE  IDEA  OF  ARCHITECTURE 

1.  Jeremy  Bentham,  The  Panopticon  Writings,  ed.  Miran  Bozovic  (Verso),  31. 

2.  John  Dinwiddy,  Bentham,  38  (Oxford.  1989). 

3.  The  Inspection-House  plan  had  originally  intended  to  be  implemented  by  the  govern- 
ment. In  1813,  to  compensate  Bentham  for  its  nonimplementation,  he  was  awarded 
£23,000  by  Parliament  which  enabled  him  to  rent  a  "magnificent  house"  in  the  west 
country  where  he  spent  his  summers  and  autumns  (see:  John  Dinwiddy,  Bentham, 
16-17). 

4.  Aldous  Huxley,  Prisons  (Trianon  &  Grey  Falcon  Presses,  1949).  See:  http://www.john 
coulthart.com/feuilleton/2006/08/25/aldous-huxley-on-piranesis-prisons/. 

5.  Jeremy  Bentham,  Panopticon  Letters,  1787,  unpublished  manuscript.  University  College 
London  Library. 

6.  Bentham,  together  with  his  brother  Samuel,  were  helping  Prince  Grigory  Potemkin, 
Catherine  the  Great's  lover  and  the  most  powerful  landowner  in  Tsarist  Russia,  to  design 
an  English  village  with  modern  industrial  factories  in  the  eastern  Belorussian  town  of 
Krichev.  Potemkin,  of  course,  is  best  remembered  now  for  his  "Potemkin  Villages" — 


200  ENDNOTES 

artificial  communities  purely  created  to  impress  Catherine  the  Great.  For  more,  see:  "The 
Bentham  Brother,  their  Adventure  in  Russia,"  Simon  Sebag  Montefiore  {History  Today, 
August  2003). 

7.  Michel  Foucault,  Discipline  &  Punish — The  Birth  of  the  Prison  (Vintage,  1979),  200. 

8.  Letter  1,  "Idea  of  the  Inspection  Principle,  The  Panopticon  Writings,"  Jeremy  Bentham, 
ed  Miran  Bozovic  (Versa,  1995). 

9.  Norman  Johnson,  Forms  of  Constraint:  A  History  of  Prison  Architecture,  56. 

10.  "The  Metropolis  and  Mental  Life,"  Georg  Simmel,  The  Sociology  ofGeorgSimmel,  ed  Kurt 
H.  WolfF(Free  Press,  1950),  409. 

11.  Michel  Yoxxczuh,  Discipline  and  Punishment:  The  Birth  of  the  Prison  (Vintage,  1979),  200. 

12.  In  2010,  smart  televisions  only  made  up  2%  of  global  household  penetration,  according  to 
research  conducted  in  August  2010  by  the  market  research  firm  iSuppli.  But  by  2014, 
iSuppli  projects,  this  global  household  penetration  will  have  risen  to  33%  (http://www.ft: 
.com/cms/s/2/9be3d4l2-b783-lldf-8ef6-00l44feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss). 

13.  Such  as  Microsoft: 's  Kinect  console,  a  product  that  connects  motion-controlled  gaming 
with  video-conferencing  and  voice  interactivity. 

14.  At  Las  Vegas's  Consumer  Electronics  Show  in  January  2011,  for  example,  there  were  380 
in-vehicle  electronics  exhibitors  showing  such  networked  technology  as  high-speed  In- 
ternet access  for  cars.  See:  "At  CES,  Cars  Take  Center  Stage,"  The  New  York  Times,  Janu- 
ary 6,  2011.  (http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/at-ces-cars-move-center 
-stage/). 

15.  Jeremy  Bentham's  vision  of  the  Panopticon  was  sketched  out  in  a  series  of  letters  he  wrote 
in  1789  from  Crecheff  in  the  Crimea  to  an  unnamed  friend  in  England.  See  The  Panopti- 
con Writings,  Edited  &  Introduced  by  Miran  Bozovic  (Verso  1995).  Bentham  had  gone  to 
Russia  in  1785  with  his  brother  Samuel  to  help  Prince  Potemkin,  Catherine  the  Great's 
lover  and  the  most  powerful  landowner  in  Russia,  design  an  English  industrial  village. 
See:  "Prince  Potemkin  and  the  Benthams,"  by  Simon  Sebag  Montefiore,  History  Today, 
August  2003. 

16.  Clay  Shirky,  Cognitive  Surplus:  Creativity  and  Generosity  in  a  Connected  Age  (Penguin 
2010),  54. 

17.  From  Clinton's  "Remarks  on  Internet  Freedom"  speech  in  Washington  D.C.,  on  January 
21,  2010.  This  term  has  also  been  used  by  Microsoft:  social  media  guru  Marc  Davis  in  his 
keynote  speech  at  the  Privacy  Identity  Innovation  (PII)  conference  in  Seattle  on  August 
18,  2010  (http://vimeo.com/l4401407). 

18.  Cognitive  Surplus,  196-197. 

19.  "Julian  Assange  Tells  Students  That  the  Web  Is  the  Greatest  Spying  Machine  Ever," 
Patrick  Kingsley,  The  London  Guardian,  March  15,2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ 
media/201  l/mar/15/web-spying-machine-julian-assange). 

20.  "Wikileaks  Founder:  Facebook  Is  the  Most  Appalling  Spy  Machine  That  Has  Ever  Been 
Invented,"  Matt  Brian,  The  Next  Web,  May  2,  2012  (http://thenextweb.com/facebook/ 
2011/05/02/wikileaks-founder-facebook-is-the-most-appalling-spy-machine-that-has 
-ever-been-invented/). 

21.  A  November  201 1  Pew  Internet  and  American  Life  research  study  reported  that  already 
4%  of  online  Americans  are  using  these  location-based  services  (http://www.pewinternet 


ENDNOTES  201 

.org/Reports/2010/Location-based-services.aspx),  suggesting — as  Jay  Yarow  at  Business 
Insider  argued  (http://www.businessinsider.com/location-based-services-2010-l  1) — 
that  services  like  Gowalla  are  growing  at  the  same  viral  rate  as  Twitter  in  its  earliest  stage 
of  development. 

22.  Shirley's  comments  about  the  increased  "legibility"  of  society  were  expressed — to  excuse 
the  pun — most  transparently  when  he  was  interviewed  by  the  BBC's  Diplomatic  Corre- 
spondent Bridget  Kendall  on  the  BBC  World  Service  radio  show,  "The  Forum,"  on  Sep- 
tember 19,  2010  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009q3m3). 

23.  Katie  Roiphe,  "The  Language  of  Fakebook,"  The  New  York  Times,  August  13,  2010. 

24.  On  YouCeleb.com,  see:  "YouCeleb  Lets  You  Look  Like  a  Star  For  Cheap,"  by  Rip  Emp- 
son,  Techcrunch,  February  28,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/youceleb-lets 
-you-look-like-a-star-for-cheap/). 

25.  The  Forum.  September  19. 2010. 

26.  Jean  Twenger  and  W.  Keith  Campbell,  The  Narcissism  Epidemic:  Living  in  the  Age  of  En- 
titlement (Free  Press,  2009). 

27.  Elias  Aboujaoude,  Virtually  You  (Norton  201 1),  72. 

28.  "The  Elusive  Big  Idea,"  Neal  Gabler,  The  New  York  Times,  August  13. 201 1. 

29.  "The  Insidious  Evils  of 'Like' Culture,"  Neil  Strauss.  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  July  2,2011. 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l4240527023045840045764l5940086842866. 
html). 

30.  "Liking  Is  for  Cowards.  Go  for  What  Hurts."  Jonathan  Franzen,  The  New  York  Times, 
May  29.  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html). 

31.  "Liking  Is  for  Cowards.  Go  for  What  Hurts."  Jonathan  Franzen.  The  New  York  Times, 
May  29,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html). 

32.  "Virtual  Friendship  and  the  New  Narcissism,"  Christine  Rosen,  The  New  Atlantis:  A  Jour- 
nal of  Technology  and  Society,  Number  17,  Summer  2007. 

33.  "The  Online  Looking  Glass,"  Ross  Douthat,  The  New  York  Times,  June  12.  2011. 

34.  "The  Saga  of  Sister  Kiki."  David  Brooks.  The  New  York  Times, ]une  23.  201 1  (http://www 
.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/24brooks.html). 

35.  "A  Billionaire's  Breakup  Becomes  China's  Social-Media  Event  of  the  Year."  Loretta  Choa 
and  Josh  Chin.  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  ]\inc  17,2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SBl 
000l424052702304563104576357271321894898.html). 

36.  "In  Praise  of  Oversharing,"  Steven  Johnson,  Time  magazine.  May  20,  2010. 

37.  Jeff  Jarvis,  "What  If  There  Are  No  Secrets,"  Buzzmachine.com,  07/26/10. 

38.  Given  in  Berlin.  See:  http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/04/22/priva£y-publicness 
-penises/. 

39.  Jarvis  announced  his  prostrate  cancer  in  a  post  entitled  "The  Small  c  and  Me"  on  his 
BuzzMachineblog  on  August  10.  2009  (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/08/10/the 
-small-c-and-me/). 

40.  See  the  March  2011  issue  of  the  UK  Wired  magazine  in  which  Jeff  Jarvis,  Steven  John- 
son, and  I  each  lay  out  our  positions  about  privacy  on  the  web  (http://www.wired.co.uk/ 
magazine/archive/2011/03/features/sharing-is-a-trap).  See  my  debate  with  Jarvis  on 
the  BBC  Today  show  on  February  5,  2011.  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/new 
sid_9388000/9388379.stm?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter).  See  also 


202  ENDNOTES 

my  August  2010  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  show  interview  with  Jarvis:  http://tech- 
crunch.com/2010/08/12/keen-on-pubhcness-jefF-jarvis-tctv/. 

41.  JefF  Jarvis,  Public  Parts:  How  Sharing  in  the  Digital  Age  Improves  the  Way  We  Work  and 
Live  (Simon  and  Schuster,  2012). 

42.  "Pubhc  Parts,"  by  Jeff  Jarvis,  May  20,  2010  (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/20/ 
public-parts/). 

43.  The  ideal  of  "publicness  granting  immortality"  was  one  of  Jarvis's  ten  theses  of  publicness 
which  he  introduced  in  a  speech  at  the  Seattle  Public/Privacy  conference  in  August  2010. 
The  other  nine  theses  were  that  publicness  1)  Makes  and  improves  relationships;  2)  Enables 
collaboration;  3)  Builds  trust;  4)  Frees  us  from  the  myth  of  perfection;  5)  Kills  taboos;  6) 
Enables  wisdom  of  our  crowd;  7)  Organizes  us;  8)  Protects  us;  9)  Creates  value.  See  also, 
Public  Parts,  56-58,  in  which  he  argues  the  Arendtian  position  that  "only  by  being  public 
can  we  leave  our  mark  on  the  world." 

44.  David  Kirkpatrick,  The Facebook  Effect  (Simon  &  Schuster  2010),  67. 

45.  Jarvis,  Public  Parts,  II- 

46.  Doerr,  who  has  a  net  worth  estimated  by  Forbes  to  be  over  a  billion  dollars,  was  an  early 
investor  in  many  of  the  greatest  Silicon  Valley  companies  including  Sun  Microsystems, 
Netscape,  Amazon,  and  Google. 

47.  See:  "John  Doerr  on  'The  Great  Third  Wave'  of  Technology,"  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May 
24,  2010. 

48.  "Kleiner  Plays  Catch-Up,"  Pui-Wing  Tam  and  Geoffrey  A.  Fowler,  The  Wall  Street  Jour- 
nal, August  29,  2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424053111903366504576 
486432620701722.html). 

49.  "Kleiner  Perkins  Invests  In  Facebook  at  $52  Billion,"  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  February 
14,  201 1.  "Kleiner  Perkins  Caufield  &  Byers  and  Facebook  are  together  at  last,"  the  piece 
begins — but  what  is  striking  is  how  little  $38  million  will  buy  you  in  today's  exuberant 
social  media  economy  (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/201  l/02/l4/kleiner-perkins 
-invests-in-facebook-at-52-billion-valuation/). 

50.  By  February  25,  201 1,  just  eleven  days  after  the  Kleiner  investment  was  announced,  this 
$52  billion  valuation  had  ballooned  to  $70  billion  on  SecondMarket.com,  a  Web  site 
where  secondary  stock  of  private  companies  is  bought  and  sold  by  investors.  (See:  "Face- 
book  Valuation  Back  at  a  Cool  $70  Billion  on  SecondMarket,  by  MG  Siegler,  February25, 
2011,  http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/25/facebook-70-billion/).  Facebook 's  expected 
IPO  in  2012  should  put  an  end  to  these  sorts  of  wild  disparities  and  changes  in  the  value 
of  the  company. 

51.  See  Bing  Gordon's  interview  with  Techcrunch.tv  in  October  2010  (http://techcrunch.tv/ 
whats-hot/watch?id=ZpYXZyMTqZYQbxJZVMzVi8— IMqliDi3)  when  he  argues  that 
the  social  category  will  grow  10  to  25  times  over  the  next  five  years. 

52.  The  Social  Network  is  loosely  adapted  from  Ben  Mezrich's  best-selling  book.  The  Acciden- 
tal Billionaires:  The  Founding  of  Facebook:  A  Tale  of  Sex,  Money,  Genius,  and  Betrayal  {Dou- 
bleday,  2009). 

53.  "Generation  Why"  Zadie  Smith,  The  New  York  Review  of  Books,  November  25,  2010 
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?page=l). 

54.  Zuckerberg  used  this  phrase  at  the  e-G8  (http://www.eg8forum.com/en/) ,  the  May  2011 
conference  in  Paris  organized  by  French  President  Nicolas  Sarkozy,  which  brought  to- 


ENDNOTES  203 

gether  many  of  the  world's  leading  Internet  thinkers,  entrepreneurs,  and  managers.  I  also 
attended  this  event,  participating  in  a  workshop  about  data  privacy. 

55.  "Facebook's  Grand  Plan  for  the  Future,"  David  Gelles,  London  Financial  Times,  December 
3,  2010  (http://www.ft.eom/cms/s/2/57933bb8-fcd9-l  Idf-ae2d-00l44feab49a.html# 
axzzl8UHJchkb). 

56.  Zuckerberg  said  this  to  the  Silicon  Valley  social  media  evangelist  Robert  Scoble.  For  the 
full  conversation  between  Zuckerberg,  Scoble,  and  a  number  of  other  journalists,  see 
Robert  Scoble 's  blogpost  of  November  3,  2010,  "Great  Interview:  Candid  Disruptive 
Zuckerberg":  http://scobleizer.com/2010/ll/03/great-interview-candid-disruptive-mark 
-zuckerberg/. 

57.  "Mark  Zuckerberg"  Lev  Grossman,  Time  magazine,  December  15,  2010. 

58.  "A  Trillion  Pageviews  for  Facebook,"  labnol.org,  August  23,  2011  (http://www.labnol 
.org/internet/facebook-trillion-pageviews/20019/). 

59.  "Facebook  Now  as  Big  as  the  Entire  Internet  Was  in  2004,"  Pingdom,  October  5,  2011 
(http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/10/05/facebook-now-as-big-as-the-entire-internet-was 
-in-2004/). 

60.  "CIA's  Facebook  Proram  Dramatically  Cut  Agency's  Costs,"  The  Onion,  March  21,  201 1 
(http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramaticalIy-cut-agencys-cos, 
19753/). 

61.  "CIA's  'vengeful  librarians'  stalk  Twitter  and  Facebook,"  The  Daily  Telegraph,  November  4, 
2011  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8869352/CIAs-vengeful-librarians 
-stalk-Twitter-and-Facebook.html). 

62.  See:  M.  G.  Siegler,  "Pincus:  In  Five  Years,  Connection  Will  Be  to  Each  Other,  Not  The 
Web;  We'll  Be  Dial  Tones,"  Techcrunch,  October  21,  2010  (http://techcrunch.com/ 
2010/10/21/pincus-web-connections/). 

63.  According  to  a  December  2010  projection  by  Horace  Dedlu  of  the  market  intelligence 
service  Asymco  (see:  http://www.asymco.com/2010/12/04/half-of-us-population-to-use 
-smartphones-by-end-of-2011/). 

64.  "Adult  Use  of  Social  Media  Soars,"  by  Sarah  E.  Needleman,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Au- 
gust 30,  2011  (http://blogs.wsj.com/in-charge/2011/08/30/adult-use-of-social-media 
-soars/). 

65.  Between  2006  and  2009,  the  Internet  and  American  Life  Project  at  the  Pew  Research  Cen- 
ter revealed  that  teenage  blogging  fell  by  half  See:  "Blogs  Wane  as  the  Young  Drift  to  Sites 
Like  Twitter,"  by  Verne  G.  Kopytoff,  The  New  York  Times,  February  20,  201 1.  (http://www 
.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/internet/21blog.html). 

GG.  "Adult  Use  of  Social  Media  Soars,"  by  Sarah  E.  Needleman,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Au- 
gust 30,  2011  (http://blogs.wsj.com/in-charge/2011/08/30/adult-use-of-social-media 
-soars/). 

67.  Between  2006  and  2009,  The  Internet  and  American  Life  Project  at  the  Pew  Research 
Center  revealed  that  teenage  blogging  fell  by  half  See:  "Blogs  Wane  as  the  Young  Drift  to 
Sites  Like  Twitter,"  by  Verne  G.  Kopytoff,  The  New  York  Times,  February  20,  2011. 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/internet/21blog.html) 

68.  "Is  the  Era  of  Webmail  Over?"  Joe  Nguyen,  Comscore.com,  January  12,2011  (http://blog 
.comscore.com/2011/01/is_the_era_of_webmail_over.html). 

69.  Official  Facebook  numbers,  July  2010. 


204  ENDNOTES 

70.  According  to  the  Internet  metrics  service  Hitwise,  with  8.93%  of  all  the  web  traffic  in 
America  going  to  Facebook  in  2010  (http://searchengineland.com/facebook-most 
-popular-search-term-website-in-2010-59875). 

71.  "Facebook  Achieves  Majority"  according  to  an  April  2011  report  by  Edison  Research 
and  Arbitron  Inc.  (http://www.edisonresearch.com/home/archives/2011/03/facebook_ 
achieves_majority.php). 

72.  "ShareThis  Study:  Facebook  Accounts  For  38  Percent  of  Sharing  Traffic  on  the  Web,"  Erick 
Schonfeld,  Techcrunch,  June  6,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/06/sharethis 
-facebook-38-percent-traffic/). 

73.  Zuckerberg:  As  Many  As  500  Million  People  Have  Been  on  Facebook  In  A  Single  Day," 
by  Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  September  22,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/ 
zuckerberg-on-peak-days-500-million-people-are-on-facebook/). 

74.  "Facebook  now  as  big  as  the  entire  Internet  was  in  2004,"  Pingdom,  Royal  Pingdom 
(http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/10/05/facebook-now-as-big-as-the-entire-internet-was 
-in-2004/). 

75.  "Twitter  Is  At  250  Million  Tweets  Per  Day,  iOS5  Integration  Made  Sign-Ups  Increate 
3X,"  Alexis  Tsotsis,  Techcrunch,  October  17,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/17/ 
twitter-is-at-250-million-tweets-per-day/).  See  also:  "Meaningful  Growth,"  The  Twitter 
Blog  December  15,  2010  (http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html). 

76.  "Twitter  Hits  100  million  "Active"  Users"  Greg  Finn,  Searchengineland.com,  Septmber 
8,  201 1  (http://searchengineland.com/twitter-hits-100-million-active-users-92243). 

77.  "Groupon  Shares  Rise  Sharply  After  I. P.O.,"  by  Evelyn  M.  Rusli,  The  New  York  Times, 
November  4,  2011  (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/ll/04/groupon-shares-spike-40 
-to-open-at-28/). 

78.  "LivingSocial  Said  to  Weigh  Funding  at  $6  Billion  Instead  of  IPO",  by  Douglas  MacMil- 
lian  and  Serena  Saitto,  Bloomberg,  September  22,  2011  (http://www.bloomberg.com/ 
news/201  l-09-22/livingsociaI-said-to-weigh-funding-at-6-billion-rather-than-pursuing 
-ipo.html).  See  also,  "LivingSocial 's  CEO  Weathers  Rapid  Growth,"  Stu  Woo,  The  Wall 
Street  Journal,  August  29,  2011  (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/08/29/qa 
-with-livingsocial-ceo-tim-oshaughnessy/). 

79.  At  the  beginning  of  December  2010,  Farmville  was  top  of  the  Facebook  app.  leaderboard, 
with  nearly  54  million  users  (see:  http://www.appdata.com/).  But  by  the  end  of  Decem- 
ber, Zynga's  virtual  reality  social  game  CitiVille,  which  was  only  launched  at  beginning 
of  the  month,  had  eclipsed  Farmville,  racking  up  61.7  million  users  (http://techcrunch 
.com/2010/12/28/zynga-cityville-farmville/). 

80.  See:  "Zynga  moves  1  Petabyte  of  Data  Daily;  Adds  1,000  Servers  a  Week,"  Leena  Rao, 
Techcrunch,  September  22,  2010.  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/22/zynga-moves-l 
-petabyte-of-data-daily-adds-1000-servers-a-week/). 

81.  "Zynga  Raising  $500  Million  at  $10  Billion  Valuation,"  Kara  Swisher,  All  Things  Digital, 
February  17, 2010  (http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110217/zynga-raises-500-million-at-10 
-billion-valuation/). 

82.  "Foursquare  Gets  3  Million  Check-Ins  Per  Day,  Signed  Up  500,000  Merchants,"  Pascal- 
Emmanuel  Gobry,  SAI  Business  Insider,  August  2,  2011  (http://articles.businessinsider 
.com/201  l-08-02/tech/30097137_l_foursquare-users-merchants-ins). 

83.  "Foursquare's  Dennis  Crowley  talks  of  check-ins,"  by  Casey  Newton,  SFGate.com,  De- 


ENDNOTES  205 

cember  25,  2011  (http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-12-25/business/30556083_l_check 
-ins-location-based-service-social-service).  For  foursquare's  business  value,  see  my  Decem- 
ber 2011  TechcrunchTV  interview  with  the  author  of  The  Power  of  foursquare  (2011), 
Carmine  Gallo  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/21/keen-on-carmine-gallo-the-power 
-of-foursquare-tctv/). 

84.  "Tumblr  Is  Growing  by  a  Quarter  Billion  Impression  Every  Week,"  Erick  Schonfeld, 
Techcrunch,  January  28,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter 
-billion-impressions-week/). 

85.  "Tumblr  Lands  $85  Million  in  Funding,"  JennaWortham,  The  New  York  Times,  Septem- 
ber 26,  2011  (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/tumblr-lands-85-million-in 
-funding/). 

86.  See  my  TechcrunchTV  interview  with  Cheever  on  May  27, 201 1:  http://techcrunch.com/ 
2011/05/27/quora-we-have-an-explicit-non-goal-of-not-selling-the-company/. 

87.  Q&A  Site  Quota  Builds  Buzz  with  A-List  Answerers,"  by  Lydia  Dishman,  Fast  Com- 
pany, January  4,  2011  (http://www.fastcompany.com/1713096/innovation-agents 
-charlie-cheever-co-founder-quora). 

88.  "Quora  Investor  Scoffs  at  $1  Billion  Offer  Price,"  Nicholas  Carson,  Business  Insider,  Feb- 
ruary 22,  2011  (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/02/22/busines 
sinsider-quora-would-turn-down-a-l-billion-offer-says-investor-2011-2.DTL). 

89.  "Personal  Data:  The  Emergence  of  a  New  Asset  Class,"  World  Economic  Forum  Report, 
January  201 1  (http://www.weforum.org/reports/personal-data-emergence-new-asset 
-class). 

90.  Brin  said  this  on  the  January  20th  2011  earning  call  with  analysts  where  Eric  Schmidt 
announced  his  resignation  as  the  company's  CEO.  See:  "Sergey  Brin:  We've  Touched  1 
Percent  Of  What  Social  Search  Can  Be,"  Leena  Rao. 

91.  "How  to  Use  Facebook  to  Get  Accepted  to  College,"  Dean  Tsouvalas,  StudentAdvisor 
.com,  February  22,  2011  (http://blog.studentadvisor.com/StudentAdvisor-Blog/bid/ 
53877/How-to-Use-Social-Media-to-Help-Get-Accepted-to-College-UPDATED). 

92.  "Are  Social  Networking  Profiles  the  Resumes  of  the  Future?"  Kelsey  Blair,  SocialTimes 
.com,  25  February  2011  (http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/02/are-social-networking 
-profiles-the-resumes-of-the-future/). 

93.  "Social  Media  History  Becomes  a  New  Job  Hurdle,"  Jennifer  Preston,  The  New  York 
Times,  July  20,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/technology/social-media 
-history-becomes-a-new-job-hurdle.html). 

94.  "Updating  a  Resume  for  201 1,"  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Elizabeth  Garone,  June  3,  201 1 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l4240527023036574045763636l2674900024. 
html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read). 

95.  "Linkedin  is  About  to  Put  Job  Boards  (and  Resumes)  Out  of  Business,"  Dan  Schawbel, 
Forbes,  June  1, 2011  (http://blogs.forbes.com/danschawbel/2011/06/01/linkedin-is-about 
-to-put-job-boards-and-resumes-out-of-business/).  Schwabel  is  also  the  author  oiMe  2.0:  4 
Steps  to  Building  Your  Future  (101 0). 

96.  In  a  November  2010  interview  with  Silicon  Valley  social  media  evangelist  Robert  Scoble. 
See:  "Great  Interview — Candid,  Disruptive  Mark  Zuckerberg",  Scobleizer.com,  Novem- 
ber 3,  2010  (http://scobleizer.com/2010/ll/03/great-interview-candid-disruptive-mark 
-zuckerberg/). 


206  ENDNOTES 

97.  "Zuckerberg:  Kids  under  13  Should  Be  Allowed  On  Facebook,"  Mical  Lev- Ram,  Fortune, 
May  20,  2011.  (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/20/zuckerberg-kids-under-13 
-should-be-allowed-on-facebook/). 

98.  Steven  Levy,  In  the  Plex:  How  Google  Thinks,  Works  and  Shapes  our  Lives  (Simon  &  Schus- 
ter, 2011),  382. 

99.  "Prediction:  Facebook  Will  Surpass  Google  in  Advertising  Revenue,"  Hussein  Fazal, 
Techcrunch,  June  6,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/05/facebook-will-surpass 
-google/). 

100.  "A  Venture-Capital  Newbie  Shakes  Up  Silicon  Valley,"  Pui-Wing  Tam,  Geoffrey  A. 
Fowler  and  Amir  Efrati,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May  10,  2011.  (http://online.wsj.com/ 
article/SB1000l424052748703362904576218753889083940.html 

101.  "Sequoia  Capital's  Mike  Moritz  Added  to  Linkedln's  Board,"  David  Cohen,  Social 
Times,  January  18,  2011  (http://socialtimes.com/sequoia-capital%E2%80%99s-michael 
-moritz-added-to-linkedin%E2%80%99s-board_bll438). 

102.  "New  Fund  Provides  Stake  in  Twitter  JP  Morgan,"  Evelyn  Rusli,  The  New  York  Times, 
February  28,  2011. 

103.  "With -Hi,  Google  Search  Goes  Truly  Social  -  As  Do  Google  Ads,"  MG  Siegler,  Tech- 
crunch, March  31,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/google-plus-one/).  See 
also,  "Google  Wants  Search  to  Be  More  Social,"  Amir  Efrati,  The  Wall  Street  Journal, 
March  31,  2011. 

104.  "Google  Launches +1,  a  New  Social  Step,"  by  Stephen  Shankland,  CNET,  June  1,  2011 
(http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20068073-264.html). 

105.  "Doing  more  with  the -hi  button,  more  than  4  billion  times  a  day,"  Business  Insider,  Au- 
gust 24,  2011  (http://www.businessinsider.com/doing-more-with-the-l-button-more 
-than-4-bilIion-times-a-day-2011-8). 

106.  "Larry  Page  Just  Tied  ALL  Employees'  Bonuses  to  the  Success  of  Google's  Social  Strat- 
egy," Nicholas  Carlson,  SAI  Business  Insider,  April  7,  2011  (http://www.businessinsider 
.com/larry-page-just-tied-employee-bonuses-to-the-success-of-the-googles-social-strategy 
-2011-4). 

107.  "Keen  On:  Why  Google  Is  Now  a  Social  Company,"  TechcrunchTV,  July  23,  201 1  (http:// 
techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/keen-on-why-google-is-now-a-social-company-tctv/). 

108.  "Google  +  Pulls  In  20  Million  in  3  Weeks,"  Amir  Efrati,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  July  22, 
201 1  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240531 1 1904233404576460394032418 
286.html). 

109.  "Google-I-  Added  $20  Billion  To  Google's  Market  Cap,"  Erick  Schonfeld,  Techcrunch, 
July  10,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/10/google-plus-20-billion-market-cap/). 

110.  "Google  Plus  Users  About  to  Get  Google  Apps,  Share  Photos  Like  Mad,"  Jerey  Scott, 
reelseo.com,  October  20,  2011  (http://www.reelseo.com/google-plus-google-apps/). 

111.  "Google-I-  Growth  Accelerating.  Passes  62  million  users.  Adding  625,000  new  users  per 
day.  Prediction:  400  million  users  by  end  of  2012,"  by  Paul  Allen,  Google  +,  December  27, 
201 1  (https://plus.googIe.eom/l  17388252776312694644/posts/ZcPA5ztMZaj ). 

112.  "Is  Too  Much  Plus  a  Minus  for  Google,"  by  Steven  Levy,  Wired.com,  January  12,  2012 
(http://www.wired.com/epicenter/201 2/01/too-much-plus-a-minus/?utm_source=feed 
burner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A-f-wiredbusinessblog-l-%28Blog 
-I— l-Epicenter-l-%28Business%29%29). 


ENDNOTES  207 

113.  Microsoft's  strategic  anti-Google  alliance  with  Facebook  is  likely  to  deepen  over  the  next 
five  years  as  the  social  economy  matures.  See,  for  example,  "Bing  Expands  Facebook  Liked 
Results,  Bing.com,  February  24,  2011  (http://www.bing.eom/community/site_blogs/b/ 
search/archive/2011/02/24/bing-expands-facebook-liked-results.aspx?wa=wsigninl.O). 
Once  we  get  beyond  the  five  year  horizon,  anything  is  possible  including,  perhaps,  Face- 
book  acquiring  Microsoft. 

114.  "Does  Gmail's  People  Widget  Spell  Trouble  for  Email  Startups?"  Anthony  Ha,  Social- 
Beat,  May  26,  201 1  (http://venturebeat.com/201 1/05/26/gmail-people-widget/). 

115.  "Sean  Parker:  Agent  of  Disruption,"  Steven  Bertoni,  Forbes,  September  21,  2011  (http:// 
www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2011/09/21/sean-parker-agent-of-disruption/). 

116.  Only  founded  in  May  2010,  GroupMe  was  already  sending  a  million  texts  every  day  by 
February  2011.  See:  "GroupMe  Is  Now  Sending  One  Million  Texts  Every  Day,"  by  Erick 
Schonfeld,  Techcrunch,  February  14,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/l4/ 
groupme-one-million-texts/).  In  August  2011,  the  year-old  GroupMe  was  acquired  for  an 
undisclosed  sum  by  Skye.  See:  "Skype  To  Acquire  Year-old  Group  Messaging  System 
GroupMe,"  Michael  Arrington,  August  21,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/21/ 
skype-to-acquire-year-old-group-messaging-service-groupme/). 

1 17.  "Cliqset  Founder  Takes  On  Personal  Publishing  And  Social  Conversations  With  Stealthy 
Startup  Glow,"  Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  May  28,  201 1  (http://techcrunch.com/201 1/05/ 
28/cliqset-founder-takes-on-personal-publishing-and-social-conversations-with-stealthy 
-startup-glow/). 

118.  The  Kleiner  Perkins  backed  Path — which  turned  down  a  $100  million  acquisition  offer 
from  Google  in  February  2011 — is  a  good  example  of  how  complete  privacy  is  no  longer 
viable  on  the  Internet.  Founded  in  2010  by  former  Facebook  executive  Dave  Morin  as  a 
completely  private  social  network  for  close  friends  and  family,  it  switched  to  a  more 
"open"  model  in  January  2011  that  enabled  users  to  publically  share  their  information. 
See:  "Kleiner  Perkins,  Index  Ventures  lead  $8.5  Million  Round  For  Path,"  Michael  Ar- 
rington, February  1,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/kleiner-perkins-leads-8 
-5-million-round-for-path/)  For  Path<#213>s  meteoric  growth,  see:  "Nearing  1  Million 
Users,  Path  Stays  The  Course,"  by  Rip  Empson,  Techcrunch,  October  20,  2011  (http:// 
techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/nearing-l-million-users-path-stays-the-course/). 

1 19.  "Companies  Are  Erecting  In-House  Social  Networks,"  Verne  G.  Kopytoff,  The  New  York 
Times,  ]unt  26,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/technology/27social.html 
?pagewanted=all). 

120.  See:  "Social  Power  and  the  Coming  Corporate  Revolution",  by  David  Kirkpatrick, 
Forbes,  September  7,  2011  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/09/07/social 
-power-and-the-coming-corporate-revolution/).  Facebook  Effect  author  Kirkpatrick  is 
much  more  sympathetic  to  Rypple  than  me,  saying  that  it  "taps  social  and  peer  pressure  to 
make  job  evaluation  more  effective  at  driving  future  performance."  In  my  mind,  however, 
this  is  an  unacceptable  invasion  of  a  worker's  privacy  and  will  add  to  the  often  already 
unbearable  pressures  of  work  in  today's  dismal  economy. 

121.  "YouTube's  New  Homepage  Goes  Social  With  Algorithmic  Feed,  Emphasis  On  Google-I- 
And  Facebook,"  Eric  Eldon,  Techcrunch,  December  1,  2011  (http://m. techcrunch. com/ 
2011/1 2/01  /newyoutube/  ?icid=tc_home_ar  t&) . 

122.  For  my  May  2011  TechcrunchTV  "So  What  Exactly  is  Social  Music?"  interviews  with 


208  ENDNOTES 

Alexander  Ljung  of  Soundcloud  and  Steve  Tang  of  Soundtracking  see:  http://techcrunch 
.com/201 1/05/31 /disrupt-backstage -pass-so-what-exactly-is-social-music-tctv/. 

123.  Reports  in  February  editions  of  Entertainment  Weekly  and  People  indicated  that  both 
The  X Factor  and  American  Idol  would  reinvent  themselves  around  social  engagement  and 
voting.  See:  "Facebook  TV  Invasion  Looms  Via  American  Idol  Voting,"  Andrew  Wallen- 
stein,  PaidContent.com,  February  23, 201 1  (http://paidcontent.org/article/4l9-facebook 
-tv-invasion-looms-via-american-idol-voting/). 

124.  "Miso  Now  Knows  What  You're  Watching,  No  Check-In  Required,"  Ryan  Lawler,  The 
New  York  Times,  September  1,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2011/ 
09/01/01gigaom-miso-now-knows-what-youre-watching-no-check-in-requ-109.html). 

125.  "Report:  Netflix  Swallowing  Peak  Net  Traffic  Fast,"  Erick  Mack,  CNET,  May  17,  2011 
(http://news.cnet.com/report-netflix-swallowing-peak-net-traffic-fast/8301-17938_105 
-20063733-l.html). 

126.  "Reed  Hastings:  We  Have  a  'Five  Year  Plan'  for  Social  Features  and  Facebook  Integra- 
tion," Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  June  1,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/01/reed 
-hastings-netflix-is-a-complement-to-the-new-release-business/). 

127.  News. me  was  developed  for  The  New  York  Times  by  Betaworks,  the  New  York  City  based 
social  media  developer  that  has  incubated  a  number  of  important  startups  including  the 
URL  shortener  bit.ly  and  the  Twitter  app  Tweetdeck.  For  my  own  "Keen  On"  Tech- 
crunch interview  with  Betaworks  CEO,  John  Borthwick  see:  http://techcrunch.com/ 
2011/01/24/keen-on-john-borthwick-betaworks-tctv/. 

128.  "Flipboard  Raises  $50  Million,  Inks  Deal  With  Oprah's  OWN,"  Mark  Heflllinger,  Digi- 
talMediaWire,  April  15,  2011  (http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/04/15/flipboard 
-raises-50-million-inks-deal-oprah039s-own). 

129.  "First  Look  at  ImageSocial,  the  Photo  Sharing  Start-Up  That  Just  Raiseed  $15  Million  in 
Funding,"  Sarah  Perez,  Techcrunch,  October  11,  201 1  (http://techcrunch.com/201 1/10/ 
ll/first-look-at-imagesocial-the-photo-sharing-network-that-just-scored-15-million-in 
-funding/). 

130.  "With  $41  million  in  hand,  Color  Launches  Implicit  Proximity-Based  Social  Network," 
Liz  Cannes,  All  Things D,  March  23, 201 1  (http://networkefl^ect.allthingsd.com/201 10323/ 
with-4lm-in-hand-color-deploys-new-proximity-based-social-network/).  See  also:  "Money 
Rushes  Into  Social  Start-Ups,"  Geoffrey  A.  Fowler,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  March  23, 
2011.  According  to  Fowler,  Color's  "view  on  privacy  is  that  everything  in  the  service  is 
public — allowing  users  who  don't  yet  know  each  other  to  peer  into  each  other's  lives." 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052748703362904576218970893843248 
.html#ixzzlHTtSKXVl). 

131.  "MeMap  App  Lets  You  Track  Facebook  Friends  on  One  Central  Map,"  Riley  McDermid, 
VentureBeat,  March  24,  2011  (http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/24/memap-launches/). 

132.  "Focusingon  the  Social,  Minus  the  Media,"  JennaWortham,  The  New  York  Times,  June  4, 
2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/201  l/06/05/technology/05ping.html?_r=l&hpw). 

133.  "Finding  a  seatmate  through  Facebook,"  CNN,  December  10,  2011  (http://articles.cnn 
.com/201  l-12-l4/travel/travel_social-media-seating_l_facebook-pals-seat-selection 
-klm-royal-dutch-airlines?_s=PM:TRAVEL). 

134.  In  October  201 1,  the  Waz  raised  $30  million  in  funding  from  Kleiner  and  from  the  Chinese 


ENDNOTES  209 

telecom  billionaire  and  Facebook  investor  Li  Ka-hing.  See:  "Social  Navigation  and  Traffic 
App  Waze  Raises  $30  Million  From  Kleiner  and  Li  Ka-Shing,  by  Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch, 
October  18,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/social-navigation-and-traffic-app 
-waze-raises-30m-from-kleiner-perkins-and-li-ka-shing/). 

135.  "Is  New  Bump.com  License  Plate  Fature  A  Privacy  Car  Wreck?"  Katie  Kindelan,  March 
18,  2011  (http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/03/is-new-bump-com-license-plate-feature 
-a-privacy-car-wreck/). 

136.  "Meet  Proust,  a  social  network  that  digs  deeper,"  Colleen  Taylor,  GigaOm,  July  19,  2011 
(http://gigaom.com/2011/07/19/proust/). 

137.  The  Ditto  app  allows  us  to  use  our  social  network  to  tell  us  what  we  should  be  doing.  See: 
"Ditto:  The  Social  App  for  What  You  Should  Be  Doing,"  M.  G.  Siegler,  Techcrunch, 
March  3,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/ditto/). 

138.  "Microsoft  in  $8.5  billion  Skype  Gamble,"  Richard  Waters,  Financial  Times,  May  10,  2011 
(http://www.ft.eom/cms/s/2/946ldbb4-7ab8-lle0-8762-00144feabdc0.html#axzzlMP 
PBpiZb). 

139.  "Software  from  Big  Tech  Firms,  Start- Ups  Take  Page  From  Facebook,"  Cari  Tuna,  The 
Wall  Street  Journal,  March  29,  201 1. 

140.  See  again:  "Social  Power  and  the  Coming  Corporate  Revolution,"  David  Kirkpatrick, 
Forbes,  September  7,  2011  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/09/07/social 
-power-and-the-coming-corporate-revolution/).  Kirkpatrick 's  notion  of  "enlightened 
companies"  here  is  rather  like  the  "enlightenment"  of  Catherine  the  Great's  Russia  which 
embraced  the  Inspection  House  ideas  of  the  Bentham  brothers. 

141.  "Social  Network  Ad  Revenues  to  Reach  $10  Billion  Worldwide  in  2013,"  eMarketer,  Oc- 
tober 5,  2011  (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008625). 

142.  "RadiumOne  About  to  Corner  the  Market  on  Social  Data  Before  Competitors  Even 
Know  What's  Happening,"  Michael  Arrington,  Techcrunch,  May  20,  2011  (http:// 
techcrunch.com/2011/05/20/radiumone-about-to-corner-the-market-on-social-data 
-before-competitors-even-know-whats-happening/). 

143.  See,  for  example,  "SocialVibe  Closes  $20  Million  Funding  Round,"  Edmund  Let,  Ad  Age, 
March  22,  2011  (http://adage.com/article/digital/socialvibe-closes-20-million-funding 
-round/149506/). 

144.  CapLinked  offers  a  collaborative  platform  for  investors  and  startups.  Launched  in  Octo- 
ber 2010,  with  already  more  than  two  thousand  companies  and  a  thousand  investors  on 
its  platform,  CapLinked  includes  Peter  Thiel,  who  Reid  Hoffman  introduced  to  Mark 
Zuckerbergas  the  original  angel  investor  in  Facebook,  as  an  investor. 

145.  Cheapism,  a  social  network  for  bargain  diners,  is  already  alerting  privacy  concerns.  See, 
for  example,  "Do  Tips  on  Nearby  Bargains  Outweigh  Privacy  Concerns?"  Ann  Carrns, 
The  New  York  Times,  May  20,  201 1. 

146.  "Investors  Cough  up  $1.6  Million  to  Dine  with  Grubwithus,  the  Brilliant  Social  Dining 
Service,"  by  M.  G.  Siegler,  Techcrunch,  May  6,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/ 
06/grubwithus-funding/). 

147.  For  a  confessional  about  social  dieting,  see:  "Apps  to  Share  Your  Pride  at  the  Gym,"  Owen 
Thomas,  The  New  York  Times,  February  9,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/ 
technology/personaltech/lObasics.html). 


210  ENDNOTES 

148.  "Fitbit  users  are  unwittingly  sharing  details  of  their  sex  lives  with  the  world,"  The  Next 
Web,  July  3,  2011  (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/07/03/fitbit-users-are-inadver- 
tently-sharing-detaiis-of-their-sex-Iives-with-the-world/). 

149.  "A  Social  Network  for  Neighbors — Former  Googlers  Launch  Yatown,"  Kenna  McHugh, 
Social  Times,  May  12,  2011  (http://socialtimes.com/a-social-network-for-neighbors 
-former-googlers-launch-yatown_b62012). 

150.  Zenergo  is  founded  by  Patrick  Ferreli  who  co-founded  SocialNet  with  Reid  Hoffman  in 
1997.  "Organizing  Offline:  Zenergo  Launches  Social  Network  for  Real  World  Activities,"  by 
Rip  Emerson,  Techcrunch,  May  5,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/06/organizing 
-offline-zenergo-launches-social-network-for-real-world- activities/). 

151.  Chime. in  is  backed  by  the  well-respected  Bill  Gross  and  his  Ubermedia  incubator.  See: 
"Bill  Gross  Explains  What's  Different  About  Chime. in:  'You  Can  Follow  Part  Of  A  Per- 
son,'" Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  October  18,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/ 
gross-chime-in-foUow-part-person/). 

152.  "LAL  People  Is  Now  ShoutFlow,  A  "Magical"  Social  Discovery  App,"  Liz  Cannes, 
AllThingsD,  September  15,  2011  (http://allthingsd.com/20110915/lal-people-is-now 
-shoutflow-a-magical-social-discovery-app/). 

153.  "Open  Study  Wants  to  Turn  the  World  into  'One  Big  Study  Group,' "  Alexis  Tsotsis,  Tech- 
crunch, June  8,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/08/openstudy-wants-to-turn-the 
-world-into-one-big-study-group/). 

154.  Asana  is  co-founded  by  Facebook  co-founder  Dustin  Moskowitz,  who  was  also  Mark 
Zuckerberg's  roommate  at  Harvard.  Like  Facebook,  Asana  has  an  obsession  with  becom- 
ing a  "utility."  See:  "Finally:  Facebook  Co-Founder  Opens  the  Curtain  on  Two-Year  Old 
Asana,"  Sarah  Lacy,  Techcrunch,  Feb  7,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/finalIy 
-facebook-co-founder-opens-the-curtain-on-two-year-old-asana/). 

155.  "Q&A:  Joshua  Schachter  on  How  Jig  Differs  from  Other  Social  Sites,"  Liz  Cannes, 
AllThingsD,  August  29,  2011  (http://allthingsd.com/20110829/qa-joshua-schachter-on 
-how-jig-is-different-from-other-social-sites/). 

156.  "Endomondo  Raises  $800,000  To  Make  Cardio  Training  Virtually  Social,"  by  Matthew 
Lynley,  Mobile  Beat,  March  22,  2011  (http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/22/ctia-endo 
mondo-app-launch/). 

157.  Disney  buying  Togetherville  is  an  example  of  what  Eco  and  Baudrillard  meant  by  "hyper 
reality."  As  I  tweeted  in  February  20 1 1 ,  what  is  a  satirist  supposed  to  do  when  Disney  really 
does  buy  kid's  social  network  Togetherville?  (http://bit.ly/fvPvPz).  For  more  on  the  Disney 
acquisition  of  Togetherville,  see:  "Disney  Acquires  Social  Network  for  Kids  Together- 
ville," Leena  Rao,  Techcrunch,  24  February  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/23/ 
disney-acquires-social-network-for-kids-togetherville/). 

158.  "Techcrunch  Disrupt  Champion  Shaker  Shakes  Down  Investors  For  $15  Million,"  Mi- 
chael Arrington,  Uncrunched,  October  9,  2011  (http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/09/ 
techcrunch-disrupt-champion-shaker-shakes-down-investors-for-15-million/).  The  idea 
of  Shaker  as  a  "social  serendipity  engine"  was  put  forward  by  Silicon  Valley  venture  capi- 
talist Shervin  Pishevar,  whose  company,  Menlo  Ventures,  was  a  seed  investor  in  Shaker. 

159.  "Amazon  Brings  Social  Reading  to  Kindle — But  Will  You  Use  It?"  Richard  MacManus, 
ReadWriteWeb,  August  8,  2011  (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_ 
brings_social_reading_to_kindle.php). 


ENDNOTES  211 

160.  Scribn  mission  statement.  See:  http://www.scribd.com/about. 

161.  "Scribn  Raises  Another  $13  Million,  Aims  To  Bring  Social  Reading  To  Every  Device,"  by 
Jason  Kincaid,  January  18,  2011,  Techcrunch  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/ 
scribd-raises-another-13-million-aims-to-bring-social-reading-to-every-device/). 

162.  "Rethinking  the  Bible  as  a  Social  Book,"  Erick  Schonfeld,  Techcrunch,  January  24,  201 1 
(http://techcrunch.com/201  l/01/24/rethinking-bible-social-book/?icid=maing|main5 
|dll3|secl_lnk3|39393). 

163.  "A  Social  Networking  Device  for  Smokers,"  Joshua  Brustein,  The  New  York  Times,  May 
10,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/ll/technology/llsmoke.html). 

164.  "RealNetworks  founder  in  Online  Video — Again,"  Russ  Adams,  The  Wall  Street  Journal, 
March  1,2011. 

165.  "The  New  Technology  of  Creepiness:  Online  Ways  to  Date,  Stalk,  Home-Wreck,  and 
Cheat,"  by  David  Zax,  Fast  Company,  February  28,  201 1  (http://www.fastcompany.com/ 
1732533/creepiness-innovation-new-ways-to-date-stalk-home-wreck-and-cheat). 

166.  "Creepy  app  uses  Twitter  and  Flickr  data  to  track  anyone  on  a  map,"  WSJ.com,  25  Febru- 
ary 201 1  (http://onespot.wsj.com/technology/201  l/02/25/b2dl9/creepy-app-uses-twitter 
-and-flickr-data). 

2.   LET'S  GET  NAKED 

1.  www.twitter.com/ericgrant. 

2.  George  Orwell,  Nineteen  Eighty-four,  (Penguin),  69. 

3.  Christopher  Hitchens,  Why  Orivell Matters  (Basic  2002).  Hitchens  ends  his  characteris- 
tically sparkling  defense  of  Orwell's  contemporary  relevancy  with  an  attack  on  the  lin- 
guistic inexactitude  of  post-modernists  like  Michel  Foucault.  It  seems  to  me,  however, 
that  if  Foucault  and  Orwell  were  both  still  around  today,  they  would  form  a  united  front, 
so  to  speak,  against  the  prying  eyes  of  social  media. 

4.  Directed  by  Ridley  Scott  and  produced  by  the  New  York  advertising  firm  of  Chiat/Day 
with  a  $900,000  budget,  this  one-minute  commercial  won  TV  Guide's  1999  "Great  Com- 
mercial of  All  Time"  award. 

5.  "Little  Brother  Is  Watching,"  Walter  Kirn,  The  New  York  Times,  October  15,  2010 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-WWLN-t.html). 

6.  "Adam  Curtis:  Have  computers  taken  away  our  power?"  Katharine  Viner,  The  Guard- 
ian, May  6,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis 
-computers-documentary). 

7.  Ibid. 

8.  "Picture  this,  social  media's  next  phase,"  by  David  Gelles,  London  Financial  Times, 
December  28,  2010  (http://www.fi:.com/cms/s/0/a9423996-lle2-lle0-92d0-00l44 
feabdc0.html#axzzl9UBncKAf). 

9.  "The  Social  Media  Bubble,"  Umair  Haque,  HBR.org,  March  23,  2010. 

10.  See:  http://twitter.com/umairh. 

11.  "The  Twitter  100",  London  Independent  Newspaper,  February  15,  2011.  Fry  and  Brand 
were  ranked  fourth  and  sixth  respectively,  (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ 
news/the-twitter-100-2215529.html). 

12.  For  my  November  2010  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch. tv  show  interview  with  Don  Tapscott, 
see:  http://techcrunch.com/2010/ll/02/keen-on-don-tapscott-macrowikinomics/. 


212  ENDNOTES 

13.  Don  Tapscott  and  Anthony  D.  Williams,  MacroWikinomics:  Rebooting  Business  and  the 
fTor/^  (Portfolio,  2010). 

14.  Ibid.,ch2. 

15.  "Upending  Anonymity,  These  Days  the  Web  Unmasks  Everyone,"  by  Brian  Stelter,  The  New 
York  Times,]une  20,  201 1  (http://www.nytimes.com/201  l/06/21/us/21anonymity.html). 

16.  Rachel  Botsford  and  Roo  Rogers,  What's  Mine  Is  Yours:  How  Collaborative  Consumption 
Is  Changing  the  Way  We  Live  fHarper  Business  2010)  See  also:  "The  End  of  Consumer- 
ism," by  Leo  Hickman,  The  Guardian. 

17.  John  Stuart  Mill,  On  Liberty  (Cambridge,  1989).  67. 

18.  "The  Insidious  Evils  of 'Like'  Culture,"  Neil  Strauss,  The  Wall  Street  Journal, ^uly  2, 2011. 

19.  "When  We're  Cowed  by  the  Crowd,"  Jonas  Lehrer,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May  28, 201 1. 

20.  "Why  I  Deleted  My  AngelList  Account,"  Bryce  Roberts,  Bryce.VC,  February  21,  201 1. 
21      "What's  the  Real  Deal  with  AngelList?"  Mark  Suster,  Techcrunch,  February  26,  2011. 

22.  "United  They  Stand,"  by  Clive  Cookson  and  Daryl  Ibury,  The  Financial  Times,  December 
28,  201 1  (http://www.ft.eom/intl/cms/s/0/9eec57ac-2c8e-l  Iel-8cca-00l44feabdc0.html 
#axzzlhyS6HQ3p). 

23.  "Let's  Get  Naked:  Benefits  of  Publicness  Versus  Privacy,"  Scot  Hacker,  March  14,  2011 
(http://birdhouse.org/blog/2011/03/l4/publicness-v-privacy/). 

24.  "One  Identity  or  More?"  Jeff  Jarvis,  Buzzmachine,  March  8,  2011. 

25.  "In  Small  Towns,  Gossip  Moves  to  the  Web,  and  Turns  Violent,"  by  A.  G.  Sulzberger, 
September  16,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves 
-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html?_r=l). 

26.  Ibid. 

27.  Ibid. 

28.  "How  the  Casey  Anthony  Murder  Case  Became  the  Social-Media  Trial  of  the  Century," 
by  John  Cloud,  Jiwe  magazine,  June  16,  2011  (http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti 
cle/0,8599.2077969,00.html). 

29      "Little  Brother  Is  Watching,"  Walter  Kirn,  The  New  York  Times,  October  20,  2010. 

30.  "Fake  Identities  Were  Used  on  Twitter  to  Get  Information  on  Weiner,"  by  Jennifer  Pres- 
ton, The  New  York  Times,  June  17,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/nyre 
gion/fake-identities-were-used-on-twitter-to-get-information-on-weiner.html?_r=2& 
partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all). 

31.  "Naked  Hubris":  "When  it  comes  to  scandal  girls  won't  be  boys  . . ."  Sheryl  Gay  Stolberg; 
". . .  while  digital  flux  makes  it  easier  for  politicians  to  stray"  Kate  Zernike,  The  New  York 
Times,  June  12,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/weekinreview/12women 
.html?partner=rss&emc=rss). 

32.  Dick  Meyer,  Why  We  Hate  Us:  American  Discontent  in  the  New  Millenium  (Crown, 
2008),  6,  16. 

33.  See,  for  example,  "Athlete-Fan  Dialogue  Becomes  Shouting  Match,"  George  Vecsey,  The 
New  York  Times,  June  18,  2011.  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/sports/basket 
ball/george-vecsey-lebron-jamess-words-and-a-deeper-meaning.html). 

34.  "Birdbrained,"  James  Poniewozik,  Time  magazine.  Vol.  177  No.  25,  June  20,  2011. 

35.  The  August  2010  Facebook  comment  from  the  British  Columbian  dealership  worker  said: 
"Sometimes  ya  have  good  smooth  days,  when  nobodys  f***ing  with  your  ability  to  earn  a 


ENDNOTES  213 

living and  sometimes  accidents  DO  happen,  its  unfortunate,  but  thats  why  [they're] 

called  accidents  right?" 

36.  "Teen  Sacked  for  'Boring'  Job  Facebook  Comment,"  Lester  Haines,  The  Register,  Febru- 
ary 26,  2009  (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/facebook_comment/). 

37.  "When  Teachers  Talk  Out  of  School,"  Jonathan  Zimmerman,  The  New  York  Times, ]une 
3,  201 1  (http://www.nytimes.com/201  l/06/04/opinion/04zimmerman. html). 

38.  "Gilbert  Gottfried  Fired  as  Aflac  Duck  after  Japanese  Tsunami  Tweets,"  Huffington  Post, 
March  13,  2011  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/l4/gilbert-gottfried-fired 
-aflac_n_835692.html). 

39.  "Man  on  Trial  over  Twitter  'Affair'  Claims  Says  Case  Has  'Big  Legal  Implications,' "  Press 
Assocation,  The  Guardian,  ]\xnt  15,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/ 
jun/15/twitter-afFair-claims-legal-implications). 

40.  "Kent  Girls  Harass  Friend,  10,  Make  Lewd  Posts  on  Her  Facebook  Account,"  Tereance 
Corcoran,  Lohud.com,  September  24,  2011  (http://www.lohud.com/article/20110924/ 
NEWS04/109240353/Kent-girls-harass-friend-10-make-lewd-posts-her-Facebook 
-account). 

41.  "Case  of  8,000  Menacing  Posts  Tests  Limits  of  Twitter  Speech,"  Somini  Sengupta,  The 
New  York  Times,  August  26,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/technology/ 
man-accused-of-stalking-via-twitter-claims-free-speech.html). 

42.  George  Orwell,  Collected  Works  (Seeker  &  Warburg,  1980),  "Inside  the  Whale,"  494-518. 

43.  Jarvis,  Public  Parts,  1 1 . 

44.  "Sean  Parker:  Yes,  My  New  Start-Up  Is  Called  Airtime,"  Matt  RosofF,  Business  Insider, 
October  17,  2011  (http://www.businessinsider.com/sean-parker-yes-my-new-startup-is 
-called-airtime-201  l-10?op=l). 

45.  "Sharing  to  the  power  of  2012,"  by  Sheryl  Sandberg,  The  Economist,  November  12,  2011 
(http://www.economist.com/node/21537000). 

46.  "Google's  Schmidt:  I  Screwed  Up  on  Social  Networking,"  Sam  Gustin,  Wired.com,  June 
1,  2011  (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/googles-schmidt-social/). 

47.  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/. 

48.  "Google  and  the  Search  of  the  Future,"  Holman  W.Jenkins,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Au- 
gust 14,  2010  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052748704901104575423294 
099527212.html). 

49.  This  is  an  internal  Facebook  initiative  announced  in  late  2009  (see.  The  Facebook  Effect, 
332). 

50.  See,  for  example,  Zuckerberg's  interview  with  Techcrunch's  Michael  Arrington  on 
January  8,  2010,  at  the  Crunchies  Award  Ceremony  (http://www.youtube.com/watch? 
v=LoWKGBloMsU). 

51.  Zuckerberg  first  stated  this  law  at  a  Silicon  Valley  event  in  November  2008.  See:  "Zucker- 
berg's Law  of  Information  Sharing,"  Saul  Hansell,  The  New  York  Times,  November  6, 2008 
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/ll/06/zuckerbergs-law-of-information-sharing/). 

52.  "Zuckerberg:  'We  Are  Building  A  Web  Where  The  Default  Is  Social,' "  Erick  Schonfeld, 
Techcrunch,  April  21,  2010  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin 
-web-default-social/). 

53.  "The  Big  Picture  of  Facebook  f8:  Prepare  for  the  Oversharing  Explosion,"  Liz  Cannes, 


214  ENDNOTES 

September   22,   2011    (http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8 
-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/). 

54.  "Facebook  Boldly  Annexes  the  Web,"  Ben  Elowitz,  AllThingsD,  September  22,  2011 
(http://ailthingsd.com/20110922/facebook-boldly-annexes-the-web/). 

55.  "With  'Frictionless  Sharing,'  Facebook  and  News  Orgs  Push  Boundaries  of  Oline  Pri- 
vacy," Jeff  Sonderman,  September  29,  2011  (http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media 
-lab/social-media/ 147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push 
-boundaries-of-reader-privacy/). 

56.  "Facebook  Boldly  Annexes  the  Web,"  Ben  Elowitz,  AllThingsD,  September  22,  2011 
(http://allthingsd.com/20110922/facebook-boldly-annexes-the-web/). 

57.  "Take  care  how  you  share,"  Chris  Nutall,  Financial  Times,  October  6,  201 1  (http://www 
.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7409813c-ef48-lle0-918b-00l44feab49a.html#axzzlavqVXfyt). 

58.  "The  Big  Picture  of  Facebook  f8:  Prepare  for  the  Oversharing  Explosion,"  Liz  Cannes, 
September  22,  2011  (http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8 
-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/). 

59.  "With  'Frictionless  Sharing,'  Facebook  and  News  Orgs  Push  Boundaries  of  Oline  Pri- 
vacy," Jeff  Sonderman,  September  29,  2011  (http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media 
-lab/social-media/ 147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push 
-boundaries-of-reader-privacy/). 

60.  "The  Facebook  Timeline  Is  the  Nearest  Thing  I've  Seen  to  a  Digital  Identity  (And  It's 
Creepy  As  Hell),"  Benwerd.com,  September  23,  2011  (http://benwerd.com/2011/09/ 
facebook-timeline-nearest-digital-identity-creepy-hell/). 

61.  "Your  Life  on  Facebook,  in  Total  Recall,"  by  Jenna  Wortham,  The  New  York  Times, 
December  15,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/l6/technology/facebook-brings 
-back-the-past-with-new-design.html?pagewanted=all). 

62.  "The  World's  Most  Powerful  People  List",  Forbes,  2  November,  2011  (http://www.forbes 
.com/powerful-people/). 

63.  "Facebook  Boldly  Annexes  the  Web,"  Ben  Elowitz,  AllThingsD,  September  22,  2011 
(http://allthingsd.com/20110922/facebook-boldly-annexes-the-web/). 

64.  According  to  Bloomberg,  Facebook 's  valuation  rose  to  over  $41  billion  in  December  2010 
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-17/facebook-groupon-lead-54-rise-in-value 
-of-private-companies-report-find.html).  Then,  on  January  2,  2011,  The  New  York  Times 
announced  that  Goldman  Sachs  had  lead  a  $500  million  investment  in  Facebook  at  a  val- 
uation of  $50  billion  (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/goldman-invests-in 
-facebook-at-50-billion-valuation/). 

65.  Facebook 's  $45  billion  valuation  would  put  it  ahead  of  the  CDPs  of  forty  African  coun- 
tries in  2009. 

66.  "Facebook's  best  friend"  William  D.  Cohan,  The  New  York  T/ww,  January  4,  2001(http:// 
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/william-d-cohan/). 

67.  See:  "Why  $50bn  may  not  be  that  much  between  friends,"  Richard  Waters,  Financial 
Times,  January  8/9,  2011(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052748703951704 
5760919933947187l6.html)  and  "Why  Facebook  Looks  Like  a  Bargain— Even  at  $50 
Billion"  by  James  B.  Stewart,  PVall  Street  Journal,  Jinuzry  22,  2011  (http://online.wsj 
.com/article/SB1000l4240527487039517045760919933947187l6.html). 

68.  "Facebook  Secondary  Stock  Just  Surged  to  $34 — That's  an  $85  Billion  Valuation,"  by 


ENDNOTES  215 

M.  G.  Siegler,  Techcrunch,  March  21,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/facebook 
-85-billion-valuation/), 

69.  The  Facebook  Effect,  200. 

70.  Ibid. 

71.  It  was  H.L.A.  Hart,  the  Professor  of  Jurisprudence  at  Oxford  University,  who  described 
Bentham  in  these  memorable  terms.  {Bentham,  Dinwiddy),  109. 

72.  The  Facebook  Effect,  199. 

73.  MingleBird  was  introduced  at  San  Francisco's  Launch  Conference  on  February  24,  201 1, 
the  annual  start-up  event  produced  by  Jason  Calacanis.  See:  "MingleBird  wants  to  make 
event  networking  less  awkward,"  Anthony  Ha,  VentureBeat,  February  24,  2011  (http:// 
venturebeat.com/2011/02/24/minglebird-launch/). 

74.  For  an  introduction  to  this  reputation  economy,  see:  "Wannable  Cool  Kids  Aim  to  Game 
the  Web's  New  Social  Scorekeepers,"  Jessica  E.  Vascellaro,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Febru- 
ary 8,  2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l4240527487046377045760823834 
664l7382.html). 

75.  AOL  acquired  About. me  for  "tens  of  millions  of  dollars"  in  December  2010,  only  four 
days  after  its  official  launch:  "AOL  acquires  Personal  Profile  Start-Up  About.Me",  by  Mi- 
chael Arrington,  Techcrunch,  December  20,  2010  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/20/ 
aol-acquires-personal-profiie-startup-about-me/). 

76.  Virtual  Friendship  and  the  New  Narcissism,"  Christine  Rosen,  The  New  Atlantis:  A  Jour- 
nal of  Technology  and  Society,  Summer  2007. 

77.  "Politics  and  the  English  Language,"  George  Orwell. 

78.  "The  Rise  of  the  Zuckerverb:  The  New  Language  of  Facebook,"  Ben  Zimmer,  The  Atlan- 
tic, September  30,  2011  (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the 
-rise-of-the-zuckerverb-the-new-language-of-facebook/245897/). 

79.  Ibid. 

80.  "Got  Twitter?  You've  Been  Scored,"  Stephanie  Rosenbloom,  The  New  York  Times,  June 
26,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/sunday-review/26rosenbloom.html). 

81.  Like  MingleBird,  eEvent  was  introduced  at  the  February  2011  Launch  event  in  San  Fran- 
cisco. See:  "eEvent  Helps  Spread  the  Word,"  by  Anthony  Ha,  VentureBeat,  February  24, 
2011  (http://venturebeat.com/2011.02/24.eevents-launch/). 

82.  John  Dewey,  Experience  and  Nature.  For  a  fuller  discussion  of  Dewey's  ideas,  see  Daniel 
J.  Solove's  The  Future  of  Reputation. 

83.  Experience  and  Nature,  166. 

84.  "The  Eyes  Have  It,"  Peggy  Noonan,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May  22-23,  2010. 

85.  The  Facebook  Effect,  200. 

3.  VISIBILITY  IS  A  TRAP 

1  This  Facebook  exchange  took  place  on  June  16,  2011,  in  the  aftermath  of  riots  in  Vancou- 
ver after  the  local  Canucks  ice  hockey  team  lost  the  final  game  of  the  Stanley  Cup.  See: 
"Vancouver  Rioters  Exposed  on  Crowdsourced  Tumblr,"  by  Brenna  Ehrlich,  Mashable, 
June  16,  2011  (http://mashable.com/2011/06/l6/vancouver-2011-tumblr/). 

2.  The  Facebook  Effect,  200. 

3.  "Little  Brother  Is  Watching,"  Walter  Kirn,  The  New  York  Times,  October  20,  2010 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-WWLN-t.html). 


216  ENDNOTES 

4.  "Social  Isolation  and  New  Technology,"  Keith  Hampton,  Lauren  Session,  Eun  Ja  Her  and 
Lee  Rainie,  November  2,  2009  (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/18-Social 
-Isolation-and-New-Technology.aspx). 

5.  "My  Space:  Social  Networking  or  Social  Isolation?"  Rob  Nyland,  Raquel  Marvez  and  Ja- 
son Beck,  Brigham  Young  University,  Department  of  Communications.  Paper  presented 
at  the  AEJMC  Midwinter  Conferencer,  Feb  23-24  2007. 

6.  "Empathy:  College  Students  Don't  Have  as  Much  as  They  Used  to,  Study  Finds,"  Science 
Daily.  May  29,  2010  (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/10052808l434.htm). 

7.  "Science  Proves  Twitter  Really  Has  Become  More  Sad  Since  2009,"  by  Graeme  McMillan, 
Time,  December  22,  2011  (http://techland.time.com/2011/12/22/science-proves-twitter 
-really-has-become-more-sad-since-2009/). 

8.  For  my  February  2011  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  Turkle,  see:  http:// 
techcrunch.com/2011/02/15/keen-on-sherry-turkle-alone-together-in-the-facebook 
-age-tctv/. 

9.  Sherry  Turkle,  Alone  Together:  Why  We  Expect  More  from  Technology  and  Less  from  Each 
0//7er  (Basic  2011). 

10.  Ibid.,  17. 

11.  Ibid.,  181. 

12.  Ibid.,  280-281. 

13.  "Facebook  Fuelling  Divorce  Research  Claims,"  Daily  Telegraph,  December  21,  2009 
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6857918/Facebook-fuelling-divorce 
-research-claims.html). 

14.  "Serendipity  Is  No  Algorithm  on  College  Dating  Site,"  Hannah  Miet,  February  25,  201 1 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/fashion/27DATEMYSCHOOL.html 
?partner=rss&emc=rss). 

15.  Alone  Together,  192. 

16.  Ibid.,  160. 

17.  Ibid.,  173. 

18.  Ibid.,  192. 

19.  Elsewhere  U.S. A,  Dalton  Conley  (Pantheon,  2009),  7. 

20.  Guy  Debord,  Society  of  the  Spectacle  (Black  and  Red,  1983),  #167. 

21.  "Social  Websites  Harm  Children's  Brains:  Chilling  Warning  to  Parents  from  Top  Neuro- 
scientist,"  David  Derbyshire,  London  Mail,  February  24,  2009  (http://www.dailymail.co 
.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents 
-neuroscientist.html). 

22.  "Small  Change:  Why  the  revolution  Will  Not  Be  Tweeted,"  Malcolm  Gladwell,  The  New 
Yorker,  October  4,  2010  (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_ 
fact_gladwell).  See  also  the  March  27,  201 1,  debate  between  Gladwell  and  Fareed  Zakaria 
on  Zakaria's  CNN  show  "Fareed  Zakaria  GPS":  (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRAN 
SCRIPTS/1 103/27/fzgps.Ol. html). 

23.  Schmidt  made  this  defense  of  the  internet  when  he  spoke  at  the  Media  Guardian  Edin- 
burgh Interneational  Television  Festival  at  the  end  of  August  2011.  See:  "Google's  Eric 
Schmidt:  don't  blame  the  internet  for  the  riots,"  The  Daily  Telegraph,  27  August  (http:// 
www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8727177/Googles-Eric-Schmidt-dont-blame 
-the-internet-for-the-riots.html). 


ENDNOTES  217 

24.  The  call  for  blackouts  was  led  by  the  prominent  Conservative  MP,  Louise  Mensch,  See: 
"Louise  Mensch  MP  calls  for  Twitter  and  Facebook  blackouts  during  riots,"  Martin  Beck- 
ford,  The  Daily  Telegraph,  August  12,  2011  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ 
crime/8697850/Louise-Mensch-MP-calls-for-Twitter-and-Facebook-blackout-during 
-riots.html). 

25.  Amongst  the  politicians  calling  for  the  baning  of  rioters  from  social  media  were  British 
Prime  Minister  David  Cameron.  See:  "David  Cameron  considers  banning  suspected 
rioters  from  social  media,"  Josh  Halliday,  The  Guardian,  August  11,  2011  (http://www 
.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/ll/david-cameron-rioters-social-media). 

26.  Joshua  Cooper  Ramo,  The  Age  of  the  Unthinkable:  Why  the  New  World  Disorder  Constantly 
Suprises  Us  and  What  We  Can  Do  About  It  (Little  Brown  2009).  Although  this  stimulating 
book  was  published  in  2009,  it  nonetheless  predicted  events  like  England's  201 1  flash  riots. 

27.  "Protests  Spurs  Online  Dialogue  on  Inequity,"  Jennifer  Preston,  The  New  York  Times, 
October  8,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/nyregion/wall-street-protest 
-spurs-online-conversation.html). 

28.  "Occupy  Wall  Street?  These  protests  Are  Not  Tahir  Square,  but  Scenery,"  The  Guardian, 
October  20,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/occupy 
-wall-street-tahrir-scenery). 

29.  "How  Russia's  Internet  Hamsters  Outfoxed  Vladimir  Putin,"  by  Andrew  Keen,  CNN, 
December  13,  2011  (http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/13/opinion/andrew-keen-russia/ 
index.html). 

30.  "The  Protester,"  by  Kurt  Andersen,  Time  magazine,  December  14,  201 1  (http://www.time 
.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373,00.html). 

3L  "Keen  On  . . .  Kurt  Andersen:  Why  2011  Has  Only  Just  Begun,"  TechcrunchTV, 
December  29,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/29/keen-on-kurt-andersen-why 
-201 1-has-only-just-begun/). 

32.  "People  Power:  A  New  Palestinian  movement,"  Joe  Klein,  Time  magazine,  March  31, 
2011  (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062474,00.html). 

33.  "London,  Egypt  and  the  Nature  of  Social  Media,"  Ramesh  Srinivasan,  The  Washington 
Post,  August  11,  2011  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/london 
-egypt-and-the-complex-role-of-social-media/201 1/08/1  l/gIQAIoud8I_story.html). 

34.  George  Friedman,  The  Next  Decade:  Where  We've  Been  . .  .  and  Where  We're  Going  {Dou- 
bleday.2011). 

35.  "A  Wake-up  Call  from  a  Fake  Syrian  Lesbian  Blogger,"  Evgeny  Morozov,  The  Financial 
r/wf5,  June  17,2011. 

36.  Invented,  as  a  pejorative  terms,  by  the  GigaOm  columnist  Matthew  Ingram,  to  critique 
both  Morozov  and  Malcolm  Gladwell.  See:  "Malcolm  Gladwell:  Social  Media  Still  Not  a 
Big  Deal",  GigaOm,  March  29,  2011. 

37.  Evgeny  Morozov,  The  Net  Delusion:  The  Dark  Side  of  Internet  Freedom  (Public  Affairs, 
2011). 

38.  "Keen  On  Yevgeny  Morozov:  Why  America  Didn't  Win  The  Cold  War  and  Other  Net 
Delusions,"  Techcrunch,  January  11,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/ll/keen-on 
-evgeny-morozov-why-america-didn%E2%80%99t-win-the-cold-war-and-other-net 
-delusions-tctv/). 

39.  "Thai  Facebookers  warned  not  to  'like'  anti-monarchy  groups,"  The  Guardian,  November 


218  ENDNOTES 

25,  2001    (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/201  l/nov/25/thai-facebookers-warned 
-like-button). 

40.  "Beijing  Imposes  New  Rules  on  Social  Networking  Sites,"  by  Edward  Wong,  The  New 
York  Times,  December  16,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/world/asia/ 
beijing-imposes-new-rules-on-social-networking-sites.html). 

41.  "Iran  Clamps  Down  on  Internet  Use,"  by  Saeed  Kamali  Dehghan,  The  Guardian, ]zmxzvy  5, 
2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/05/iran-clamps-down-internet-use). 

42.  In  Veracruz,  for  example,  the  State  Assembly  has  actually  made  it  a  crime  to  use  Twitter. 
See:  "Mexico  Turns  to  Social  Media  for  Information  and  Survival,"  by  Damien  Cave,  The 
New  York  Times,  September  24,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/ 
americas/mexico-turns-to-twitter-and-facebook-for-information-and-survival.html). 

43.  "Bodies  hanging  from  bridge  in  Mexico  are  warning  to  social  media  users",  by  Mariano 
Castillo,  CNN.com,  September  14,  2011  (http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-l4/world/ 
mexico.violence_l_zetas-cartel-social-media-users-nuevo-laredo?_s=PM:WORLD). 

44.  In  conversation  with  Liz  Cannes  of  All  Things  D,  December  29,  2010  (http://net 
workeffect.allthingsd.com/20101229/video-greylocks-reid-hofFman-and-david-sze-on 
-the-future-of-social/). 

45.  "All  animals  are  equal,  but  some  animals  are  more  equal  than  others."  From  Orwell's  Ani- 
malFarm. 

46.  From  "Twitter  Statistics  for  2010" — A  December  2010  report  by  the  social  media  moni- 
toring group  Sysomos  which  examined  more  than  a  billion  tweets  (http://www.sysomos 
.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010). 

47.  "The  Web  is  Dead,  Long  Live  the  Internet,"  Chris  Anderson,  Wired,  August  17,  2011 
(http://www.wired.eom/magazine/2010/08/fF_webrip/all/l). 

48.  "Got  Twitter?  You've  Been  Scored,"  Stephanie  Rosenbloom,  The  New  York  Times,  June 

26,  201 1  (http://www.nytimes.com/201  l/06/26/sunday-review/26rosenbloom. html). 

49.  "To  Tweet  or  Not  to  Tweet,"  Zachary  Karabell,  Time  Magazine,  April  11,  2011  (http:// 
www.time.com/time/printout/0,88l6,2062464,00.html#). 

50.  The  Rise  and  Fall  of  Elites,  Vilfredo  Pareto  (Bedminster  Press,  2008),  36. 

51.  See  The  Numerati  (2008,  Houghton  Miflin),  Stephen  Baker's  excellent  introduction  to 
our  new  numerati  ruling  class. 

52.  Meglena  Kuneva,  Keynote  Speech,  "Roundtable  on  Online  Data  Collection,  Targeting 
and  Profiling,"  Brussels,  March  31,  2009. 

53.  James  Gleick,  The  Information:  A  History,  A  Theory,  A  Flood  (Pantheon,  201 1),  8. 

54.  "The  Web's  New  Gold  Mine:  Your  Secrets,"  Julia  Angwin,  July  30,  2010  (http://online 
.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052748703940904575395073512989404.html). 

55.  Ibid. 

56.  James  Gleick,  The  Information  (Pantheon,  201 1),  8.  See  also  my  June  TechcrunchTV  in- 
terview with  Gleick. 

57.  Eli  Pariser,  The  Filter  Bubble:  What  the  Internet  is  Hiding  from  You  (Penguin,  2011),  6. 
See,  also,  my  TechcrunchTV. 

58.  "Does  Facebook  Really  Care  About  You?"  Douglass  RushkofF,  CNN.com,  September  23, 
201 1  (http://edition.cnn.com/201 1/09/22/opinion/rushkofF-facebook-changes/index 
.html?hpt=hp_bnl  1). 


ENDNOTES  219 

59.  "The  Mobile  Allure,"  by  Barney  Jopson,  The  Financial  Times,  December  21,  2011 
(http://www.ft.eom/intl/cms/s/0/8f992b56-2b0b-llel-a9e4-00l44feabdc0.html 
#axzzli4QIUlrn). 

60.  "Less  Web  Tracking  Means  Less  Effective  Ads,  Researcher  Says,"  Somini  Sengupta,  The 
New  York  Times,  September  15,  2011  (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/less 
-web-tracking-means-less-effective-ads-researcher-says/). 

61.  "Online  Trackers  Rake  in  Funding,"  Scott  Thurm,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  February  25, 
2011. 

62.  "Generation  Why,"  Zadie  Smith. 

63.  See:  "The  Web's  New  Gold  Mine:  Your  Secrets"  (July  30,  2010),  "Microsoft  Quashed  Ef- 
fort to  Boost  Online  Privacy"  (August  2,  2010),  "Stalkers  Exploit  Cellphone  GPS"  (Au- 
gust 3,  2010)  "On  the  Web's  Cutting  Edge,  Anonymity  in  Name  Only  (August  4,  2010), 
"Google  Agonizes  on  Privacy  as  Ad  World  Vaults  Ahead"  (August  10,  2010). 

64.  "Your  Apps  Are  Watching  You"  Scott  Thurm  and  Yukari  Iwantani  Kane,  The  Wall  Street 
Journal,  December  18,  2010  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052748704694 
004576020083703574602.html). 

65.  "Like"  Button  Follows  Web  Users,"  Amir  Efrati,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May  18,  2011 
(http://onIine.wsj.com/article/SB1000l42405274870428150457632944l4329956l6. 
html). 

66.  "Why  Facebook's  Facial  Recognition  Is  Creepy,"  Sarah  Jacobsson,  PC  World,  June  8, 
2011  (http://www.pcworld.com/article/229742/why_facebooks_facial_recognition_is_ 
creepy.html). 

67.  "How  Facebook  Is  Making  Friending  Obsolete,"  Julia  Angwin,  The  Wall  Street  Journal, 
December  15, 2009  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126084637203791583.htmI). 

68.  "How  Facial  Recognition  Technology  Can  Be  Used  to  Get  Your  Social  Security  Num- 
ber," Kashmir  Hill,  Forbes,  August  1,  2011  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/ 
201 1/08/01 /how-face-recognition-can-be-used-to-get-your-social-security-number/). 

69.  "Computers  That  See  You  and  Keep  Watch  Over  You,"  Steve  Lohr,  January  1,  2011 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html). 

70.  Steven  Johnson,  Where  Good  Ideas  Come  From,  Chapter  IV  (Riverhead,  2010) 

71.  "Computers  That  See  You  and  Keep  Watch  Over  You." 

72.  The  two  researchers  are  Pete  Warden,  a  former  Apple  employee,  and  Alasdair  Allan,  a  data 
visualisation  scientist.  See:  "iPhone  keeps  record  of  everywhere  you  go,"  by  Charles  Ar- 
thur, London  Guardian,  April  20,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/ 
apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears). 

73.  "Apple,  Google  Collect  User  Data,"  Julia  Angwin  and  Jennifer  Valentino-Devries,  The 
Wall  Street  Journal,  April  22,  2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l4240527487 
039837045762771017234536l0.html). 

74.  "Is  Google  Making  Us  Stupid?"  Nicholas  Carr,  The  Atlantic, ]n\y/A.\i^nsx.  2008  (http://www 
.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-s  tupid/6868/). 

75.  "Google  Calls  Location  Data  'Valuable,'"  Amir  Efrati,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  May  1, 
2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l4240527487037033045762974500305178 
30.html?mod=googlenews_wsj) . 

76.  "Amazon  Big  Brother  patent  knows  where  you'll  go,"  by  Eric  Sherman,  CBS  News, 


220  ENDNOTES 

December  14,  2011  (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505124_l62-57342567/amazon-big 
-brother-patent-knows-where-youil-go/),  by  knowing  where  we've  been  and  where  we  will 
go,  promises  to  be  a  particularly  intrusive  algorithm  of  digital  coercion  and  seduction. 

77.  "The  Evolution  of  a  New  Trust  Economy,"  Brian  Solis,  BrianSolis.com,  December  9, 
2009. 

78.  Dan  Gilmor,  Google -h.  September  28,  2011.  (https://plus.google.com/11321043100 
6401244l70/posts/YYwcR5Ua5JN). 

79.  Robert  Vamosi,  When  Gadgets  Betray  Us:  The  Dark  Side  of  our  Infatuation  with  New 
Technologies  (Basic,  2011).  Also  see  my  April  28,  2011  TechcrunchTV  interview  with  Va- 
mosi (http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/28/keen-on-robert-vamosi-when-gadgets-betray-us 
-book-giveaway/ ). 

80.  "Internet  Probe  Can  Track  You  Down  to  Within  690  Metres,"  Jacob  Aron,  New  Scientist, 
April  5,  2011  (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20336-internet-probe-can-track 
-you-down-to-within-690-metres.html). 

81.  "Data  Privacy,  Put  to  the  Test,"  Natasha  Singer,  The  New  York  Times,  April  30,  201 1. 

82.  "Who's  Watching  You?  Data  Privacy  Day  Survey  Reveals  Your  Fears  Online,"  PRNews- 
wire,  January  28,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter-billion 
-impressions-week/). 

83.  "Report  finds  Internet  users  worry  more  about  snooping  companies  than  spying  Big 
Brother,"  Associated  Press,  June  2,  2011  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ 
technology/ report-finds-internet-users-worry-more-about-snooping-companies-than 
-spying-big-brother/2011/06/03/AG7CyeHH_story.html). 

4.   DIGITAL  VERTIGO 

1.  Dan  Auiler,  Vertigo,  TheMakingofa  Hitchcock  Classic  (St  Martin's  2000),  xiii  (from  intro- 
duction by  Scorcese). 

2.  Filmed  in  the  second  half  of  October  1957  in  Stage  5  of  Paramount  Studios  in  Bel  Air. 

3.  The  screenplay  written  by  Alec  Coppell,  Samuel  Taylor  and  Hitchcock  himself,  and 
adapted  from  the  1954  French  novel  The  Living  and  The  Dead  (D'Entre  Les  Morts)  by 
Pierre  Boileau  and  Thomas  Narcejac. 

4.  The  spiral  is  the  central  motif  of  the  movie.  See,  for  example.  Vertigo's  mesmerizingly 
twisted  opening  titles,  designed  by  Hitchcock's  long-time  collaborator,  Saul  Bass,  or  Mad- 
eleine's hair  style,  or  the  twisted  streets  of  San  Francisco. 

5.  Fitzgerald  quote  {Tender  Is  the  Night). 

6.  Kevin  Starr,  Americans  and  the  California  Dream  1850-1915  (Oxford  University  Press 
1973),  58. 

7.  Gray  Brechin,  Imperial  San  Francisco  (University  of  California  Press,  2006),  32. 

8.  Both  played  by  Kim  Novak.  It  is  universally  acknowledged  that  this  was  Novak's  greatest 
role,  in  spite — or  perhaps  because  of — her  distaste  for  the  bullying  Alfred  Hitchcock. 

9.  All  the  clothing  in  the  movie  was  designed  by  Edith  Head,  another  member  of  Hitch- 
cock's team  of  longtime  collaborators. 

10.  Francois  TrufFaut,  Hitchcock  Truffaut:  The  Definitive  Study  of  Alfred  Hitchcock,  (Touch- 
stone, 1983),  111. 

11.  In  the  2002  British  Film  Instiintt/ Sight  and  Sound  m^^zzme.  list  of  the  greatest  movie  of 
all  time,  a  poll  determined  by  a  leading  group  of  international  movie  critics,  Hitchcock's 


ENDNOTES  221 

Vertigo  was  voted  the  second  best  movie  of  all  time,  behind  Orson  Welles'  Citizen  Kane. 
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/critics.html. 

12.  In  the  Universal  DVD,  chapter  31  at  1:58:27. 

13.  See,  in  particular,  the  1937  essay  "The  Nature  of  the  Firm"  by  the  University  of  Chicago 
economist  Ronald  Coase  which  lays  out  the  necessity  of  the  firm  and  explains  its  central 
role  in  the  twentieth-century  economy. 

14.  The  Power  of  Pull:  How  Small  Moves,  Smartly  Made,  Can  Set  Big  Things  in  Motion,  John 
Hagel  III,  John  Seely  Brown  &  Lang  Davidson,  (Basic  2010),  36. 

15.  The  Organization  Man,W\\\i2.m  H.  Whyte  (University  of  Pennsylvania  Press,  2000),  51. 

16.  The  Fifties,  David  Halberstam  (Villiard  Books,  1993),  526-527. 

17.  The  term  "Silicon  Valley"  was  coined  by  a  Californian  entrepreneur  called  Ralph  Vaerst 
and  popularized  in  1971  by  tVit  Electronic  News  ']oun\dii'ist  Don  Hoefler. 

18.  There  are  many  excellent  histories  of  the  computer  and  the  Internet  including  David  Ka- 
plan's Silicon  Boys  And  Their  Valley  of  Dreams  (1999,  Perennial);  Tracy  Kidder's  Soul  of  the 
New  Machine  (Back  Bay  2000);  John  Naughton's  A  Brief  History  of  the  Future  (Overlook, 
2000);  and  Robert  Cringky,  Accidental  Empires  (Harper,  1996). 

19.  David  Kaplan,  Silicon  Boys  and  Their  Valley  of  Dreams  (1999,  Perennial)  40. 

20.  Ibid.,  49. 

21.  Mike  Malone  called  them  "the  greatest  collection  of  electronics  genius  ever  assembled.  In 
addition  to  Moore  and  Noyce,  they  included  Julius  Blank,  Victor  Grinich,  Eugene 
Kleiner,  Jean  Hoerni,Jay  Last  and  Sheldon  Roberts.  {The  Big  Score),  68-69. 

22.  Mike  Malone,  The  Big  Score,  Doubleday  1985, 40. 

23.  Joseph  Schumpeter,  Capitalism,  Socialism  and  Democracy  (New  York:  Harper,  1975) 
[orig.  pub.  1942],  82-85. 

24.  John  MarkofF,  "Searching  for  Silicon  Valley,"  The  New  York  Times,  April  16,  2009. 

25.  Kelly's  What  Technology  Wants  (Viking,  2008)  and  Carr's  The  Shallows  (2008)  represent 
different  sides  of  the  same  coin.  Kelly  presents  technology  as  our  brain;  Carr  says  that 
technology  is  destroying  our  brain.  I  confess  that  I  have  sometimes  fallen  into  this  trap 
too,  especially  in  my  2007  book  Cult  of  the  Amateur,  which  oversimplified  the  causal  rela- 
tionship between  the  Internet  and  our  culture. 

26.  Richard  Florida,  The  Rise  of  Creative  Class,  17. 

27.  Available  on  DVD:  The  Complete  Monterey  Pop  Festival — Criterion  Collection,  (Blu- 
Ray)  (2009). 

28.  San  Francisco  Oracle,  Vol.  1 ,  Issue  5,  2. 

29.  Todd  Gitlin,  The  Sixties:  Years  of  Hope,  Days  of  Rage  (Bantam,  1993),  203. 

30.  Published  by  Malcolm  Cowley  at  Viking  Press.  See  David  Halberstram,  The  Fifties  (Vil- 
liard Books,  1993)  ch  21,  306. 

31.  Theodore  Roszak,  The  Making  of  the  Counter  Culture  (Doubleday  1968)  184. 

32.  Mark  Andrejevic,  Reality  TV:  The  Work  of  Being  Watched  (Rowman  &  Littlefield,  2004),  26. 

33.  A  History  of  Private  Life,  Volume  III,  "Passions  of  the  Renaissance"  (Harvard,  1989), 
376. 

34.  Ibid. 

35.  Karl  Marx,  "The  18th  Brumaire  of  Louis  Bonaparte,"  from  Karl  Marx,  Selected  Writings, 
edited  by  David  McLellan  (Oxford  University  Press,  1977),  300. 

36.  Theodore  Roszak,  The  Making  of  a  Counter  Culture,  (Doubleday  1968),  chapter  1.  "By 


222  ENDNOTES 

technocracy,  Rosznak  meant:  'that  social  form  in  which  an  industrial  society  reaches  the 
peak  of  its  organizational  integration.  It  is  the  ideal  men  usually  have  in  mind  when  they 
speak  of  modernizing,  up-dating,  rationalizing,  planning.' " 

37.  For  an  incisive  cultural  critique  of  our  contemporary  cult  of  authenticity,  see  Andrew  Pot- 
ter's The  Authenticity  Hoax:  How  We  Get  Lost  Finding  Ourselves  (Harper  Collins,  2010). 
See  also  "Public  and  Private,"  my  essay  on  J.  S.  Salinger  in  The  Barnes  &  Noble  Review  of 
March  22,  2010  (http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Public-and 
-Private/ba-p/2322). 

38.  Sennett,  The  Fall  of  Public  Man,  220. 

39.  Christopher  Lasch,  The  Culture  of  Narcissism:  American  Life  in  an  Age  of  Diminishing 
Expectations,  (Norton,  1991),  10. 

40.  Alvin  Toffler,  Future  Shock  (Random  House,  1970),  284. 

41.  "Adam  Curtis:  Have  Computers  Taken  Away  our  Power?"  Katharine  Viner,  The  Guard- 
ian, May  6,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis 
-computers-documentary). 

5.  THE  CULT  OF  THE  SOCIAL 

1.  Patrick  McGilligan,  Alfred  Hitchcock:  A  Life  in  Darkness  and  Light  (ReganBooks,  2003), 
159. 

2.  The  Power  of  Pull,  42.  For  more  on  Hagel  and  Seely  Brown's  theory  of  the  "big  shift" 
from  an  industrial  to  a  digital  economy,  see  my  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  interview 
with  them  from  September  2010  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/keen-on-power-of 
-pull-tctv/). 

3.  "The  Online  Looking  Glass,"  Ross  Douthat,  TheNew  York  Times,  ]\inc  12, 2011. 

4.  John  MarkofF,  What  the  Dormouse  Said:  How  the  60s  Counterculture  Shaped  the  Personal 
Computer  Industry,  (Viking,  2005). 

5.  Fred  Turner,  From  Counterculture  to  Cyberculture:  Stewart  Brand,  The  Whole  Earth  Net- 
work, and  the  Rise  of  Digital  Utopianism  (Chicago  University  Press,  2006). 

6.  James  Harkin,  Cyburbia,  The  Dangerous  Idea  That's  Changing  How  We  Live  and  Who  We 
Are  (Little  Brown,  2009). 

7.  Tim  Wu,  The  Master  Switch:  The  Life  and  Death  of  Information  Empires,  (Knopf,  2010). 

8.  Ibid.,  169. 

9.  Tim  Berners-Lee,  Weaving  The  Web:  The  Original  Design  and  Ultimate  Destiny  of  the 
World  Wide  Web  (Harper  Business,  2000). 

10.  Ibid.,  201. 

11.  Ibid.,  172. 

12.  Turner, /"row  Counterculture  to  Cyberspace,  14. 

13.  David  Brooks,  Bobos  in  Paradise:  The  New  Upper  Class  and  How  They  Got  There  (Touch- 
stone, 2000). 

14.  Thomas  Frank,  The  Conquest  of  Cool:  Business  Culture,  Counterculture,  and  the  Rise  of  Hip 
Consumerism  (University  of  Chicago,  1997). 

15.  Apple's  iconic  marketing  campaign  around  "Think  Different"  was  produced  by  the  Madi- 
son Avenue  firm  of  TBWA/Chiat/Day,  who  produced  the  equally  iconic  1984  Super  Bowl 
advertisement  for  the  Apple  Macintosh  personal  computer. 

16.  "Social  Power  and  the  Coming  Corporate  Revolution,"  David  Kirkpatrick,  Forbes,  Sep- 


ENDNOTES  223 

tembcr  7,  2011  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/09/07/social-power-and 
-the-coming-corporate-revolution/). 

17.  "The  Challenge  Ahead,"  Peter  Drucker.  From  The  Essential  Drucker,  (Harper  Business, 
2001).  347. 

18.  Ibid.,  348. 

19.  Ibid.,  348. 

20.  Daniel  Pink,  Free  Agent  Nation:  The  Future  of  Working  for  Yourself  {W2.rncT  Business 
Books,  2001). 

21.  "While  We  Weren't  Paying  Attention  the  Industrial  Age  Just  Ended,"  Techcrunch.tv,  7 
February  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/keen-on-seth-godin-while-we-werent 
-paying-attention-the-industrial-age-just-ended-tctv/). 

22.  Seth  Godin,  Linchpin:  Are  You  Indispensable?"  (Portfolio,  2010). 

23.  Hugh  McLeod,  Ignore  Everybody:  and  39  Other  Keys  to  Creativity  (Portfolio,  2009). 

24.  Gary  Vaynerchuck,  Crush  It:  Why  Now  Is  the  Time  to  Cash  In  On  Your  Passion  (Harper 
Studio,  2009). 

25.  Reid  Hoffman  and  Ben  Casnocha,  The  Start-Up  of  You:  An  Entrepreneurial  Approach  to 
Buildinga  Killer  Career  (Crown,  2012). 

26.  "The  Start-Up  of  You,"  Thomas  L.  Friedman,  The  New  York  Times,  July  12,  2011  (http:// 
www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/opinion/13friedman.html). 

27.  Kevin  Kelly,  Out  of  Control:  The  Biology  of  Machines,  Social  Systems,  &  the  World  (Perseus, 
1994). 

28.  For  more  on  Kelly's  vision  of  the  connected  future,  see  my  January  18,  2011  "Keen  On" 
Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  him  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/keen-on-kevin 
-kelly-what-does-kevin-kelly-want-tctv/). 

29.  Turner,  174. 

30.  Harkin,  1930. 

31.  Kirkpatrick,  332. 

32.  James  Gleick,  The  Information:  A  History,  A  Theory,  A  Flood  (Pantheon  201 1)  48. 

33.  Michael  Malone,  Valley  of  the  Heart's  Delight:  A  Silicon  Valley  Notebook  1963-2001 
(Wiley,  2002). 

34.  Robert  Puttnam,  Bowling  Alone,  2000  (Simon  &  Schuster),  410. 

35.  Charles  Leadbeater,  We-Think:  Mass  Innovation,  Not  Mass  Production  (Profile,  2008). 

36.  Yochai  Benkler,  The  Wealth  of  Networks:  How  Social  Production  Transforms  Markets  and 
Freedom,  (Yale,  2006),  Yochai  Benkler  (Yale,  2006). 

37.  Erik  Qualman,  Socialnomics:  How  Social  Media  Transforms  the  Way  We  Live  and  Do 
Business  (Wiley,  2009). 

38.  Clay  Shirky,  Here  Comes  Everyone:  The  Power  of  Organizing  Without  Organizations 
(Penguin,  2008). 

39.  Charlene  Li,  Open  Leadership:  How  Social  Technology  Can  Transform  the  Way  You  Lead. 
See  also  my  July  2010  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  Li  and  Shirky  (http:// 
techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/techcrunch-tv-keen-on-connectivit/). 

40.  Mitch  Joel,  Six  Pixels  of  Separation:  Everyone  Is  Connected,  Connect  Your  Business  to  Ev- 
eryone (Business  Plus,  2009). 

41.  Simon  Mainwaring,  We  First:  How  Brands  and  Consumers  Use  Social  Media  to  Build  a 
Better  World  (Palgrave  Macmillan,  201 1). 


224  ENDNOTES 

42.  Eric  Greenberg  and  Karl  Weber,  Generation  We:  How  Millennial  Youth  Are  Taking  Over 
America  and  Changing  Our  World  Forever  (Puchatusan,  2008). 

43.  Nicholas  A.  Christakis  and  James  H.  Fowler,  Connected:  The  Surprsing  Power  ofUur  So- 
cial Networks  and  How  They  Shape  Our  Lives  (Little  Brown,  2009). 

44.  Jane  McGonigal,  Reality  Is  Broken:  Why  Games  Make  Us  Better  and  How  They  Can  Change 
the  World  (Penguin,  201 1).  See,  in  particular,  chapter  4:  "Stronger  Social  Connectivity."  See 
also  my  March  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  McGonigal  in  which  she  argues 
that  "social  is  everything." 

45.  Lisa  Gansky,  The  Mesh:  Why  The  Future  of  Business  Is  Sharing  ^Portfolio,  2010J.  See  also 
my  September  2010  "Keen  On"  Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  Gansky  (http://techcrunch 
.com/2010/09/22/keen-on-lisa-gansk/). 

46.  Francois  Gossieaux,  The  Hyper-Social  Organization:  Eclipse  Your  Competition  by  Leverag- 
ing Social  Media  (McGraw-Hill,  2010). 

47.  Gleick,  The  Information,  322.  See  "Into  the  Meme  Pool"  (ch  1 1),  Gleick's  lucid  and  infor- 
mative chapter  on  the  history  of  meme,  both  as  a  scientific  and  cultural  idea. 

48.  "Social  Networking  Affects  Brains  Like  Falling  in  Love,"  Adam  Penenberg,  Fast  Company, 
July  1,2010. 

49.  BBC  News,  August  10,  2010  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment 
-10925841). 

50.  Harold,  the  fictional  hero  (Brooks's  self-styled  Emile  of  this  twenty-first  Rousseauan 
guide  to  happiness)  of  The  Social  Animal  and  the  apotheosis  of  sociability  is  known  to  his 
school  friends  as  "the  mayor" — perhaps  not  uncoincidentally  giving  him  the  same  status 
as  the  most  popular  networkers  on  the  geo-location  service.  David  Brooks,  The  Social  Ani- 
mal: The  Hidden  Sources  of  Love,  Character  and  Achievement  (Random  House,  2011). 

51.  "It's  Not  About  You,"  David  Brooks,  The  New  York  Times,  May  30,  2011. 

52.  Steven  Johnson,  Where  Good  Ideas  Come  From:  The  Natural  History  of  Innovation  (River- 
head,  2010). 

53.  Ibid.,  44. 

54.  Ibid.,  206. 

55.  Jaron  Lanier,  "Digital  Maoism:  The  Hazards  of  the  New  Online  Collectivism,"  Edge.org 
5/3/06  (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html). 

56.  Power  of  Pull,  247. 

57.  Jeffjarvis,  Public  Parts,  (Simon  &  Schuster,  201 1),  70-71. 

58.  Clay  Shirky,  Cognitive  Surplus,  (Penguin,  2010).  For  more  on  Shirky's  vision  of  a  collab- 
orative future,  see  my  July  2010  "Keen  on"  Techcrunch.tv  interview  with  him  (http:// 
techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/techcrunch-tv-keen-on-connectivit/) 

59.  Cognitive  Surplus,  19. 

60.  See  "Ringside  at  the  Web  Fight"  by  Michael  Wolff,  Vanity  Fair,  March  2010.  As  Wolff 
argues,  "Clay  Shirky  ...  is  a  man  whose  name  is  now  uttered  in  technology  circles  with  the 
kind  of  reverence  with  which  lefi:-wingers  used  to  say,  "Herbert  Marcuse." 

61.  Connected,  Christakis  &  Fowler,  chapter  2. 

62.  Cognitive  Surplus,  60. 

63.  "Gilgamesh  to  Gaga,"  by  John  Tresch,  Lapham's  Quarterly,  Winter  2011  (http://www 
.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/gilgamesh-to-gaga.php?page=7). 


ENDNOTES  225 

6.  THE  AGE  OF  THE  GREAT  EXHIBITION 

1.  Jean  Baudrillard,  The  Conspiracy  of  Art  (Semiotext,  2005),  26. 

2.  The  Oxford  Union,  Christopher  Hollis  (Evans  Brothers,  1965),  96. 

3.  Jan  Morris,  Oxford  (Oxford,  1979). 

4.  Ibid.,  21. 

5.  Ibid.,  3. 

6.  http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US. 

7.  "Fun  in  Following  the  Money,"  Daniel  Terdiman,  Wired  magazine,  May  8,  2004  (http:// 
www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/05/63363). 

8.  Christopher  Hollis,  The  Oxford  Union  (Evans  Brothers,  1965),  106. 

9.  In  addition  to  Rossetti,  the  other  artists  who  painted  the  murals  were  Valentine  Prinsep, 
John  Hungerford  Pollen,  William  Morris,  Edward  Burne-Jones,  Rodham  Spencer  Stan- 
hope, Arthur  Huges  and  William  and  Briton  Riviere. 

10.  For  the  best  introduction  to  the  Pre-Raphaelite  project,  see:  John  D.  Renton,  The  Oxford 
Union  Murals. 

11.  Vi\i\]o\\nson,  Art:  A  New  History  (Harper  CoUins,  2003),  533. 

12.  Hollis,  The  Oxford  Union,  209. 

13.  E.  H.  Gombrich,  The  Story  of  Art  {V)cvzi<\on,  1995)  384. 

14.  A.N.  Wilson,  The  Victorians  (Norton,  2003). 

15.  Laurence  Des  Cars,  The  Pre-Raphaelites:  Romance  and  Realism  (Discoveries),  69. 

16.  Nothing  If  Not  Critical,  1 15. 

17.  Ibid.,  116. 

18.  Vz\x\]o\\r\son,  Art:  A  New  History  (Harper  Collins,  2003),  534. 

19.  Robert  Hughes,  Nothing  If  Not  Critical  (Knopf,  1990),  116. 

20.  The  Oxford  Union  1823-1923,  Herbert  Arthur  Morrah  (Cassell  &  Co,  1923),  175. 

21.  <9x/ora',Jan  Morris,  219. 

22.  The  Oxford  Union,  Christopher  Hollis  (Evans  Brothers,  1965). 

23.  Ibid.,  101. 

24.  In  the  1980s,  for  example,  over  £125,000  was  raised  by  the  Landmark  Trust  to  help  re- 
store the  building.  See  the  Union  booklet:  The  Oxford  Union  Murals,  John  D.  Renton, 
15-16. 

25.  Eric  Hobsbawn,  The  Age  of  Revolution  1989-1848  (Vintage,  1996),  168. 

26.  Michael  Leapman,  The  World  for  a  Shilling:  How  the  Great  Exhibition  of  1951  Shaped  a 
Nation  (Headline,  2001). 

27.  Joel  Mokyr,  The  Level  of  Riches:  Technological  Creativity  and  Economic  Progress  (Oxford 
University  Press,  1990),  81. 

28.  As  Bentham  notes  in  Introduction  to  the  Principles  of  Morals  and  Legislation  first  published 
in  1798:  "The  word  international,  it  must  be  acknowledged,  is  a  new  one;  though,  it  is 
hoped,  sufficiently  analogous  and  intelligible.  It  is  calculated  to  express,  in  a  more  signifi- 
cant way,  the  branch  of  law  which  goes  commonly  under  the  name  of  the  law  of  nations: 
an  appellation  so  uncharacteristic,  that,  were  it  not  for  the  force  of  custom,  it  would  seem 
rather  to  refer  to  internal  jurisprudence."  Bentham  other  neologisms  include  the  words 
"maximize"  and  "minimalize,"  as  well  as  "codify"  and  "codification"  (see:  John  Dinwiddy, 
Bentham,  47). 


226  ENDNOTES 

29.  The  industrial  nature  of  the  1949  gold  rush  is  reflected  in  the  emergence  of  the  mining 
engineer  as  San  Francisco's  new  aristocrazia  (see:  Brechlin,  Imperial  San  Francisco,  53). 

30.  Eric  Hobsbawn,  The  Age  of  Capital:  1848-1875  (Vintage  1996),  34,  63. 

31.  Eric  Hobsbawn,  The  Age  of  Revolution:  1789-1848  (Vintage),  168. 

32.  Karl  Marx  and  Friedrich  Engels,  The  Communist  Manifesto  (Oxford  University  Press. 

33.  Robert  Rhodes  James,  Prince  Albert:  A  Biography  (Knopf,  1984),  190. 

34.  Ibid. 

35.  A.  N.  Wilson,  The  Victorians  (Norton,  2003). 

36.  German  Ideology 

37.  Michael  Leapman,  The  World  for  a  Shilling:  How  the  Great  Exhibition  of  1851  Shaped  a 
Nation  (Headline,  2011),  24. 

38.  Robert  Rhodes  James,  Prince  Albert:  A  Biography  (Knopf,  1984),  147. 

39.  Bill  Bryson,  At  Home:  A  Short  History  of  Private  Life  (Doubleday,  2010),  7. 

40.  Jumes,  Prince  Albert,  199. 

41.  Bryson,At Home,  II. 

42.  Hobsbawn,  Age  of  Revolution,  186. 

43.  James,  Prince  Albert,  200. 

44.  Michael  Leapman,  The  World  for  a  Shilling,  59. 

45.  The  eccentric  Babbage  and  his  even  more  eccentric  ideas  were  a  thorn  in  the  side  of  many 
prominent  Victorians.  "What  shall  we  do  to  get  rid  of  Mr.  Babbage  and  his  calculating 
machine"  British  Prime  Minister  Robert  Peel  wrote  in  1842  (Gleick,  The  Information, 
104-105). 

46.  George  Friedman,  The  Moral  Consequences  of  Economic  Growth  (Knopf,  2005),  20. 

47.  J.  R.  Piggott,  The  Palace  of  the  People:  The  Crystal  Palace  at  Sydenham,  1854-1936  (Hurst, 
2004). 

48.  Ibid..  61. 

49.  Ibid.,  207. 

50.  Ernest  Gellner,  Nations  and  Nationalism  (Cornell,  1983),  32-33. 

51.  Aldous  Huxley,  Prisons  (Trianon  &  Grey  Falcon  Presses,  1949).  See:  http://www.john 
coulthart.com/feuilleton/2006/08/25/aldous-huxley-on-piranesis-prisons/. 

52.  Charles  Fried,  "Privacy,"  77  Yale  Law  Journal  (1968),  475,  477-478. 

53.  "Little  Brother  Is  Watching,"  Walter  Kirn,  The  New  York  Times,  October  15,  2010 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-WWLN-t.html). 

54.  "So  Is  Web  3.0  Already  Here?"  Sarah  Lacy,  Techrunch,  April  18, 201 1  (http://techcrunch 
.com/201 1/04/ 18/so-is-web-3-0-already-here-tctv/). 

55.  Discipline  &  Punish:  The  Birth  of  the  Prison,  207. 

7.  THE  AGE  OF  GREAT  EXHIBITIONISM 

1 .  Discipline  &  Punish,  200. 

2.  Norman  Johnson,  Forms  of  Constraint:  A  History  of  Prison  Architecture  (University  of  Il- 
linois Press,  2000),  56. 

3.  William  Blackburn's  building  of  the  modern  Oxford  prison  was  triggered  by  the  posting 
of  a  inmate's  crude  caricature  showing  the  gaoler  of  Oxford  Castle  standing  on  a  mound 
of  dung.  Then,  in  1786,  the  prison  governors  dismissed  the  gaoler  and  appointed  a  prison 
reformer  called  Daniel  Harris  in  his  place. 


ENDNOTES  227 

4.  A  separate  women's  prison  was  built  in  1851,  the  same  year  as  the  Great  Exhibition. 

5.  Jan  Morris,  Oxford,  35. 

6.  In  its  representation  of  Mr  Bridger's  life  of  luxury  inside  the  jail.  The  Italian  Job  inadver- 
tently predicted  the  future  of  the  Oxford  prison  with  its  cells  offering  all  the  finest  conve- 
niences of  life. 

7.  "Oxford  Castle  Unlocked",  Official  Guide  (www.oxfordcastleunlocked.co.uk). 

8.  MALMAISON/TAGLINE 

9.  "Sentenced  to  Luxury:  Malmaison  Oxford  Castle  Hotel,"  Fodors.com,  February  16, 
2007. 

10.  We  Live  in  Public. 

11.  "Web  Privacy:  In  Praise  of  Oversharing,"  Steven  Johnson,  May  20,  2010. 

12.  The  term  Web  2.0  v/as  invented  and  marketed  by  the  Tim  O'Reilly,  the  founder  and  CEO 
ofO'Reilly  Media  in  2004. 

13.  Gary  Shteyngart,  Super  Sad  True  Love  Story  (Random  House,  2010). 

14.  "Apparat  Chic:  Talking  with  Gary  Shteyngart,  Shelfari,  August  11,  2010  (http://blog 
.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2010/08/apparat-chic-talking-with-gary-shteyngart.html). 

15.  Keen  On  ...  Gary  Shteyngart,  Techcrunch,  July  15,2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/ 
07/15/keen-on-a-super-sad-true-love-story-tctv/). 

16.  Super  Sad  True  Love  Story,  209-210. 

17.  Johnson  is  convinced  that  Harris's  vision  failed  to  come  true.  "It  is  far  easier  to  set  up  web 
cameras  and  share  video  online  today  -  thanks  to  YouTube  and  ubiquitous  high-speed 
bandwidth — and  yet  almost  no  one  chooses  to  display  themselves  in  such  an  extreme 
way,"  he  argues  in  his  May  20,  2010  Time  magazine  essay  "Web  Privacy:  In  Praise  of 
Oversharing."  One  wonders,  however,  which  Internet  Johnson  is  watching  and  whether 
he  simply  chooses  to  ignore  the  manifold  self-revelationary  networks  that  are  shaping  the 
Web  3.0  world. 

18.  Robert  Scoble  and  Shell  Israel,  Naked  Conversations:  How  Blogs  Are  Changing  the  Way 
Businesses  Talk  with  Customers  (Wiley,  2006). 

19.  "The  Chief  Humanizing  Officer,"  The  Economist,  Feb  10,  2005  (http://www.economist 
.com/node/3644293?story_id=3644293). 

20.  The  List:  Five  Most  Influential  Tweeters,"  Tim  Bradshaw,  The  Financial  Times,  March  18, 
201 1  (http://www.ft.eom/cms/s/2/01aldc56-50e3-l  Ie0-8931-00l44feab49a.html#axz 
zlLK2XdH9T).  In  addition  to  Scoble,  theother  four  leading  tweeters  were  the  American 
actor  Ashton  Kutcher  (@aplusk),  the  British  comedian  Stephen  Fry  (@stephenfry),  the 
student  blogger  James  Buck  (@jamesbuck)  and  Sarah  Brown  (@SarahBrownuk),  the  wife 
of  former  British  Prime  Minister  Gordon  Brown. 

21.  "Klout  Finally  Explains  Why  Obama  Is  Ranked  Lower  Than  Robert  Scoble,"  by  Alyson 
Shontell,  Business  Insider,  December  2,  2011  (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011 
-12-02/tech/30466703_l_social-media-klout-president-obama). 

22.  "Help,  I've  fallen  into  a  pit  of  steaming  Google-I-  (what  that  means  for  tech  Hogging)," 
Robert  Scoble,  Scobleizer,  August  18,  2011  (http://scobleizer.com/2011/08/18/help-ive 
-fallen-into-a-pit-of-steaminggoogle/). 

23.  For  an  up-to-date  summary  of  Scoble's  use  of  social  media,  see  his  speech  in  Amsterdam  to 
The  Next  Web  conference  on  29  April,  2011  (http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/04/29/ 
robert-scoble-the-next-web-human-reality-virtual-video-tnw2011/). 


228  ENDNOTES 

24.  "Much  ado  about  privacy  on  Facebook  (I  wish  Facebook  were  MORE  OPEN!!!)",  Scobleizer 
.com,  May  8, 2010. 

25.  Richard  Sennett,  The  Fall  of  Public  Man  (Norton,  1974),  282. 

26.  "Caesar  Salad  @  The  Ritz-Carlton,  Half  Moon  Bay"  (http://www.foodspotting.com/ 
reviews/556332). 

27.  "Keen  On  ....  Are  We  All  Becoming  Robert  Scoble?"  Techcrunch,  December  1,  2010. 

8.  THE  BEST  PICTURE  OF  2011 

1.  Stanley  Weintraub,  Uncrowned  King:  The  Life  of  Prince  Albert  (Free  Press,  1997),  209. 

2.  Larry  Downes,  The  Laws  of  Disruption,  (Basic,  2009),  73. 

3.  "The  Right  to  Privacy,"  Earl  Warren  and  Louis  Brandeis,  Harvard  Law  Review,  Vol.  IV, 
December  15,  1890. 

4.  "How  a  soccer  star  sparked  the  freedom  debate  of  our  age,"  by  Lionel  Barber,  The  Finan- 
cial Times,  May  1^/1^,2.011. 

5.  "Man  on  Trail  over  Twitter  'Affair'  Claims  Says  Case  Has  'Big  Legal  Implications,' "  Press 
Association,  June  15,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/15/twitter 
-affair-claims-legal-implications). 

6.  "Zuckerberg,  Schmidt  Counter  Sarkozy's  Calls  for  Internet  Regulation  at  'EG8,'"  by 
Rebecca  Kaplan,  Nationaljournal,  May  28,  2011  (http://www.nationaljournal.com/ 
tech/zuckerberg-schmidt-counter-sarkozy-s -calls -for-internet-regulation-at-eg8 
-20110526). 

7.  "Congress  Calls  on  Twitter  to  Block  Taliban,"  by  Ben  Farmer,  Daily  Telegraph,  December 
25,  201 1  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8972884/Congress-calls-on 
-Twitter-to-block-Taliban.html). 

8.  "US  Court  Verdict  'Huge  Blow'  to  Privacy,  Says  former  WikiLeaks  Aide,"  by  Dominic 
Rushe,  The  Guardian,  November  11,  2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/ 
1 1  /us-verdict-privacy-wikileaks-twitter). 

9.  "Google  Reaches  Agreement  on  FTC's  Accusations  of  "Deceptive  Privacy  Practices"  in 
Buzz  Rollout,"  Lenna  Rao,  Techcrunch,  March  30,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/ 
03/30/google-reaches-agreement-on-ftcs-accusations-of-deceptive-privacy-practices-in 
-buzz-rollout/). 

10.  "Facebook  'Unfair'  on  Privacy",  by  Shayndi  Raice  and  Julia  Angwin,  The  Wall  Street  Jour- 
nal, November  30,  2011  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l42405297020344l704 
577068400622644374.html). 

11.  "Why  should  I  care  about  digital  privacy?"  Bob  Sullivan,  MSNBC,  March  10,  2011 
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41995926/ns/technology_and_science/). 

12.  "US  Urges  Web  Privacy  Bill  of  Rights,"  Julia  Angwin,  The  Wall  Street  Journal,  Deceber 
18,  2010  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l42405274870339520457602352l6596 
72058.html). 

13.  "The  White  House  Offers  Up  a  National  Data  Breach  Law,"  Kashmir  Hill,  Forbes,  May 
12,2011  (http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/05/12/the-white-house-ofFers-up-a 
-national-data- breach-law/). 

14.  "Sen.  Rockefeller  Introduces  'Do  Not  Track'  Bill  for  Internet,"  Cecilia  Kang,  Washington 
Post,  May  9,  2011  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/sen-rockefeller 
-introduces-do-not-track-bill-for-internet/2011/05/09/AF0ymjaG_blog.html). 


ENDNOTES  229 

15.  "Leibowitz  pushes  Google  on  privacy,"  Mike  Zapler,  April  19,  201 1  (http://www.politico 
.com/news/stories/041 1/53440. hrml). 

16.  In  late  April  2011,  Senator  Al  Franken  announced  his  intention  to  hold  Congressional 
hearings  about  this  data  spill.  See:  "Franken  sets  hearings  on  Apple  Google  tracking,"  The 
Wall  Street  Journal,  Marketwatch,  May  4,  2011  (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ 
franken-sets-hearing-on-apple-google-tracking-201 1-04-26). 

17.  "Sen.  Franken  wants  Apple  and  Google  to  require  privacy  policies  for  all  smartphone 
apps,"  Gautham  Nagesh,  The  Hill,  May  25,  201 1  (http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/ 
technology/ 163293-sen-franken-wants-apple-and-google-to-require-privacy-policies-for 
-all-smartphone-apps). 

18.  "A  cloud  gathers  over  our  digital  freedoms,"  Charles  Leadbeater,  The  Financial  Times, 
June  6,  2011  (http://www.ft.eom/cms/s/0/e7253a6e-9073-lle0-9227-00l44feab49a. 
html#axzzlPdrwd8fs). 

19.  "Corporate  Rule  of  Cyberspace,"  Slavoj  Zizek,  Inside  Higher  Ed,  May  2,  2011  (http:// 
www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/05/02/slavoj_zizek_essay_on_cloud_computing_ 
and_  privacy). 

20.  "Show  Us  the  Data.  (It's  Ours,  After  All.),  Richard  H.  Thaler,  The  New  York  Times,  April 
23,2011. 

21.  "Senators:  Net  Privacy  Law  for  Children  in  Need  of  Overhaul,"  Matthew  Lasar,  Ars 
Technica,  April  30,  2010  (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/senators 
-net-privacy-law-for-children-in-need-of-overhaul.ars). 

22.  "Setting  Boundaries  for  Internet  Privacy,"  Kevin  J.  O'Brien,  The  New  York  Times  Septem- 
ber 18,  2011. 

23.  "Google  Faces  New  Demands  in  Netherlands  Over  Street  View  Data,"  Archibald  Preus- 
chat,  Wall  Street  Journal,  April  20,  201 1  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000l424052 
74870392250457627315l673266520.html). 

24.  "Apple  and  Android  phones  Face  Tighter  Laws  in  Europe,"  Tim  Bradshaw  and  Maija 
Palmer,  The  Financial  Times,  May  18,  2011. 

25.  "Facebook  to  Be  Probed  in  EU  for  Facial  Recognition  in  Photos,"  Stephanie  Bodoni, 
Bloomberg  Businessweek,  June  8,  2011  (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-06 
-08/facebook-to-be-probed-in-eu-for-facial-recognition-in-photos.html). 

26.  "Facebook  is  wrong  to  back  a  light  touch  for  the  web,"  Vittorio  Colao,  June  5,  2011 
(http://www.ft.eom/cms/s/0/e78517f6-8fa9-lle0-954d-00l44feab49a.html#axzz 
lPLSGwcH9). 

27.  "EU  to  Force  Social  Network  Sites  to  Enhance  Privacy,"  Leigh  Phillips,  London  Guard- 
/^«,  March  16,  2011. 

28.  "LinkedIn  'Does  a  Facebook' — Your  Name  and  Photo  Used  in  Ads  by  Default,"  Paul 
Duckin,  NakedSecurity.com,  August  11,  2011  (http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/ 
08/11/linkedin-copies-facebook-does-a-privacy-bait-and-switch/). 

29.  "Data  Privacy,  Put  to  the  Test,"  Natasha  Singer,  The  New  York  Times,  April  30,  2011 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/01stream.html). 

30.  "Web's  Hot  New  Commodity:  Privacy,"  The  IVall  Street  Journal, Julia.  Angwin  and  Emily 
Steel,  February  28,  201 1.  See  also:  "How  to  Fix  (or  Kill)  Web  Data  about  You,"  Riva  Rich- 
mond, The  New  York  Times,  April  13,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/ 
technology/personaltech/14basics.html?_r=l). 


230  ENDNOTES 

31.  See  in  particular  my  conversation  with  Bret  Taylor  on  online  technology  show,  The  Gill- 
mor  Gang,  on  April  22  2010  (http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2010/05/15/ 
gillmor-gang-04-22-10/)  when  I  turn  the  tables  on  the  social  media  executive  and  inter- 
rogate him  about  his  identity. 

32.  "Facebook  Executive  Takes  Heat  on  Hearing  About  Privacy,"  Jim  Puzzanghera,  The  Los 
Angeles  Times,  May  20,  2011  (http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/20/business/la-fi 
-facebook-privacy-201 10520). 

33.  "The  Facebook  Resisters,"  by  Jenna  Wortham,  The  New  York  Times,  December  13,  2011 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-tell 
-about-it.html). 

34.  "Nobody  Goes  To  Facebook  Anymore,  It's  Too  Crowded,"  Mike  Arrington,  Uncrunched, 
January  2,  2012  (http://uncrunched.com/2012/01/03/nobody-goes-to-facebook-anymore 
-its-too-crowded/). 

35.  "Path  Is  Where  the  A  List  Hangs  Out,  Don't  Tell  Anyone,"  by  Loic  Le  Meur,  Loiclemeur 
.com,  January  2,  2012  (http://loiclemeur.com/english/2012/01/path-is-where-the-a-list 
-hangs-out-dont-tell-anyone.html). 

36.  See  the  June  18,  201 1  "Social  Networking  Sites  and  our  Lives"  report  by  the  Pew  Internet 
and  American  Life  Project  (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology 
-and-social-networks.aspx).  While  this  report  appears  to  celebrate  the  fact  that  Facebook 
users  are  more  trusting  than  average,  my  conclusion  is  less  optimistic.  Given  Facebook 's 
history  on  privacy  and  their  record  on  other  deeply  controversial  issues  like  facial  recogni- 
tion technology,  it's  hard  to  avoid  being  cynical  about  the  intelligence  of  these  "trusting" 
Facebook  users. 

37.  "The  end  of  Blippy  as  we  know  it,"  Alexia  Tsotsis,  Techcrunch,  May  19,  201 1  (http://www 
. google. com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q="The-l-end-t-of-l-Blippy-l-as-l-we-l-know-l-it", 
&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8). 

38.  "Privacy  Isn't  Dead.  Just  Ask  Google-I-,"  Nick  Bilton,  The  New  York  Times,  July  18,  201 1 
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-just-ask-google/). 

39.  "Google  Steps  Up  its  Privacy  Game,  Launches  Good  to  Know,"  Violet  Blue,  ZDNet, 
October  18,  2011  (http://www.zdnet.com/bIog/violetblue/google-steps-up-its-privacy 
-game-launches-good-to-know/746). 

40.  "News  Outlets  Preserve  Privacy  by  Giving  Users  Ways  to  mute  Facebook 's  Frictionless 
Sharing,"  Josh  Constine,  Inside  Facebook,  October  7,  2011  (http://www.insidefacebook 
.com/201 1/10/07/news-frictionless-sharing/). 

41.  "Spotify  Adds  'Private  Listening'  Mode  After  Complaints  from  Facebook  Users,"  Ellis 
Hamburger,  Business  Insider,  September  29,  2011  (http://articles.businessinsider.com/ 
2011-09-29/tech/302l6833_l_spotify-ceo-facebook-friends-founder-daniel-ek). 

42.  "Negative  Online  Data  Can  Be  Challenged,  at  a  Price,"  Paul  Sullivan,  The  New  York  Times, 
June  10,  2011  (http://wvvw.nytimes.com/2011/06/ll/your-money/llwealth.html). 

43.  "Erasing  the  Digital  Past,"  Nick  Bilton,  The  New  York  Times,  April  1,  2011  (http://www 
.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/fashion/03reputation.html). 

44.  Joshua  Foer,  Moonwalking  with  Einstein:  The  Art  and  Science  of  Remembering  Everything, 
(Penguin,  2011),  21-24. 

45.  "Web  Images  to  Get  Expiration  Date,"  BBC  Technology  News,  January  20,  01 1  (http:// 
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12215921). 


ENDNOTES  231 

46.  Moonwalking  with  Einstein,  ch  4. 

47.  "Web  2.0  Suicide  Machine:  Erase  Your  Virtual  Life,"  January  9,  2010  (http://www.npr 
.org/tempIates/story/story.php?storyId=l  22379695). 

48.  http://suicidemachine.org/. 

49.  "The  Twitter  Trap,"  Bill  Keller,  The  New  York  Times,  May  18,  2011.  Keller,  whose  tenure 
as  executive  editor  of  The  New  York  Times  was  marked  by  a  number  of  public  spats  with 
Arianna  Huffington  about  the  real  value  of  social  media,  announced  his  retirement  in 
June  2011. 

50.  "Internet  Users  Now  Have  More  and  Closer  Friends  Than  Those  Offline,"  Casey  Johnson, 
ArsTechnica,June  16,2011. 

51.  "Study:  You've  Never  Met  7%  Of  Your  Facebook  'Friends,' "  Alexia  Tsotsis,  Techcrunch, 
June  16,  2011. 

52.  Pew  Internet  &  American  Life  Project,  "Social  Networking  Sites  and  our  Lives:  How 
people's  trust,  personal  relationships,  and  civic  and  political  involvement  are  connected  to 
their  use  of  social  networking  sites  and  other  technologies",  by  Keith  N.  Hampton,  Lau- 
ren Sessions  Goulet,  Lee  Rainie  and  Kristen  Purcell,  June  16,  2011. 

53.  Robin  Dunbar,  How  Many  Friends  Does  One  Person  Need?  Dunbar's  Number  and  Other 
Evolutionary  Quirks  (Harvard  University  Press,  2010),  21. 

54.  Ibid.,  22. 

55.  Ibid. 

56.  Ibid.,  23. 
57    Ibid.,  34. 

58.  "The  Socialized  and  Appified  Oscars,"  Liz  Cannes,  The  Wall  Street  Journal's  All  Things  D, 
February  25,  2011  (http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110225/the-socialized-and 
-appified-oscars/). 

59.  "The  Oscars  on  Twitter:  Over  1.2Million  Tweets,  388K  Users  Tweeting,"by  Alexia  Tsotsis, 
Techcrunch,  February  28,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/the-oscars-twitter/). 

60.  Steven  Lukes,  Individualism  (Blackwell  1973),  21. 

61.  "Liking  Is  for  Cowards.  Go  for  What  Hurts,"  Jonathan  Franzen,  The  New  York  Times, 
May  28,  2011. 

62.  "Oscar  Coronation  for  'The  King's  Speech,'"  Brooks  Barnes  and  Michael  Cieply,  The 
New  York  Times,  February  27,  2011  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/movies/ 
awardsseason/28oscars.html?adxnnl=l&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=l  308428523 
-T2YIxoWp8UZNaTcv/lal  PA). 

CONCLUSION:  THE  WOMAN  IN  BLUE 

1.  The  movement  had  been  founded  at  the  Cower  Street  home  of  the  parents  of  John  Everett 
Millais,  one  of  the  most  influential  of  Pre  Raphaelite  Brotherhood  artists.  Millais  didn't 
participate  in  Rossetti's  Oxford  Union  project. 

2.  Richard  Reeves,  John  Stuart  Mill,  11. 

3.  This  term  was  coined  by  a  fellow  Benthamite,  Henry  Taylor.  See:  Reeves,  John  Stuart 
Mill,  52. 

4.  John  Stuart  Mill,  Autobiography,  ch  5  (Riverside,  1969). 

5.  Ibid. 

6.  Ibid. 


232  ENDNOTES 

7.  John  Dinwiddy,  Bentham. 

8.  J.  S.  Mill,  On  Liberty  and  Other  Writings  (Cambridge,  1989),  86. 

9.  "Zuckerberg:   Kids  Under   13  Should  Be  Allowed  on  Facebook,"  Michael  Lev-Ram, 
CNNMoney.com,  May  20,  2011. 

10.  New  Yorker  review  of  The  Social  Network. 

11.  Jeffjarvis,  What  Would  Google  Do?  {Co\VmsV>nsmc%s,lQlQ)9)A^. 

12.  "Virtual  Friendship  and  the  New  Narcissism,"  Christine  Rosen,  The  New  Atlantis,  Num- 
ber 17,  15. 

13.  Ibid. 

14.  www.twitter.com/ajkeen. 

15.  Richard  Reeves  John  Stuart  Mill,  1 26. 

16.  Philip  Steadman,  Vermeer's  Camera:  Uncovering  the  Truth  Behind  the  Masterpieces 
(Oxford,  2001). 

17.  Tracy  Chevalier,  Girl  with  a  Pearl  Earring  (Harper  Collins,  2000),  247. 

18.  "Bin  Laden  Announcment  Has  Highest  Sustained  Tweet  Rate  Ever,  at  3440  Tweets  Per 
Second,"  by  Alexia  Tsotsis,  Techcrunch,  May  2,  2011  (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/ 
02/bin-laden-announcement-twitter-traffic-spikes-higher-than-the-super-bowl/). 

19.  Richard  Reewes  John  Stuart  Mill,  15. 

20.  Michel  Foucault,  The  Order  of  Things:  An  Archeology  of  the  Human  Sciences  (Vintage, 
1973).  386-387. 


INDEX 


Abine  Inc.  168 

Aboujaoude,  Elias,  24-25 

About.me,  62 

Absurdistan  (Shteyngart),  144 

Academy  Awards  (2011),  176-79 

Accidental  Billionaires  (Mezrich),  176 

advertising,  35-37, 42, 62-63, 

76-80 
Airtime,  38, 45, 47-48,  103,  150, 

176 
Albert,  Prince  (United  Kingdom),  123, 

129-40, 143, 146, 161-62, 178 
Albright,  Julie,  48 
Allow,  168 

Alone  Together  {T\xA\t),  151 
Altimeter  Group,  63 
Amazon,  26, 43,  82 
American  Idol,  39 
Andersen,  Kurt,  71-72 
Anderson,  Chris,  75 
Andreessen,  Mark,  35-36 
AngelList,43,  51 
Angwin,  Julia,  80 
Anthony,  Casey  and  Caylee,  53 
AOL, 62,  111 
apparatchik,  141-42,  144,  151,  152 


Apple,35,47, 107, 109, 168 

iCloud,  166 

iPhones.  40, 79,  81-83, 142, 153, 
165, 167 
Arab  Spring  movement,  51, 71-72 
Araf,  Amina,  73 
Arendt,  Hannah,  141 
Aristotle,  8,  197«33 
Arrington,  Mike,  57,  169 
Arthur,  King  (Britain),  121,  124-26 
Asana,  43 

Asquith,  Herbert,  123 
Assange,  Julian,  23,  28,  55,  142,  163 
The  Atlantic,  63 

Babbage,  Charles,  93,  136 

Backes,  Michael,  171 

Baker,  Mitchell,  167 

Balliol,John,  8-9, 66 

Barber,  Lionel,  162-63 

Bardeen,John,  94 

Barlow,  John  Perry,  108,  109,  112,  117 

Baudrillard,Jean,  14,  148 

Bebo,  174 

BeKnown,35,43,  150 

Bell,  Alexander  Graham,  107 


234 


INDEX 


Bell,  Daniel,  102 
Bentham,  Jeremy,  131,  192 

architectural  concepts  of,  7,  13, 

19-24, 26-27, 29-30, 44-45, 

61,73,79-81,83,85,91,122, 

132-33, 140-44, 146. 148, 

150-51, 199«3 
Auto-Icon  of,  1-4,  10-16, 18,  69, 

118,154,157,180-82,189-90 
"greatest  happiness  principle"  by, 

3, 11, 16,50,66, 182-84, 196«12 
utilitarianism  of,  10-12,  16,  22,  27, 

50,61-64,91, 140-41, 180-82 
Bentham,  Samuel,  19-20,  140-41 
Berners-Lee,  Tim,  108,  122 
Bezos,  JefF,  26-27 
Bhutto,  Benazir,  123 
Bible,  43 

Bierstadt,  Albert,  34-35,  84,  186 
Big  Brother  (show),  54 
Bilton,  Nick,  170-71 
Bing,  38 

Bin  Laden,  Osama,  191 
Blackburn,  William,  20,  146-47 
Blekko,  38 
Blippy,  169-70 
Blu,  44 

Boileau,  Pierre,  16,  26 
Botsford,  Rachel,  50 
Bowling  Alone  (Putna.m),  113,  117 
Brandeis,  Louis,  7,  13,  16,  22,  162 
Brand,  Stewart,  107 
Brattain,  Walter,  94 
Brave  New  JVorU  (Huxky),  1,  140 
Breakup  Notifier  app,  45 
Brechin,  Gray,  87 
Brigham  Young  University,  67 
Brin,  Sergey,  33 

Brooks,  David,  25, 109, 114-15 
Brougham,  Lord,  10 


Brown,JohnSeely,91,  106-7,  116,  119 

Bryson,  Bill,  135 

Bump.com,  40 

Burne-Jones,  Edward,  125,  136 

BuyWithMe,42 

Buzzd,  40 

Cafebot,  62 

Caine,  Michael,  147 

Campbell,  Keith,  24-25 

CapLinked,  42 

Capsule  hotel,  150-51,  154, 160 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  126 

Carr,  David,  51 

Carr,  Nicholas,  17,  81, 96 

7^^C^5^/^(Kafka).21 

Catherine  the  Great,  20,  79,  141 

Chatter,  39 

Cheapism,  42 

Cheever,  Charlie,  32 

Chevalier,  Tracy,  180,  190 

children,  social  media  use  by,  30-31, 

34. 43, 67, 166, 169 
Children's  Online  Privacy  Protection 

Act  (COPPA),  166 
Chime. in,  42 
Christakis,  Nicholas,  118 
Churchill,  Winston,  123 
CIA,  28-29 
CitiVille.  32 
Citizen  Kane,  14 
Clementi,  Tyler,  53-54,  56 
Clinton,  Hillary,  23 
Club  Penguin,  43 
Cognitive  Surplus  (Shirky),  117 
Cohan,  William  D.,  60 
Colao,  Vittorio,  167 
Color,  40 
The  Communist  Manifesto 

(Marx/Engels),  132 


INDEX 


235 


ComScore,  31 

Conley,Dalton,69.71,103 

connectivity,  social.  See  also  social 
media/networking 
individual  autonomy  v.,  16-21, 

50-52,91-92,180-93 
loneliness  and,  27-30,  38-39, 66-69 
unity  and,  6-10, 61-64,  106-20 

Coward,  Noel,  147 

Craig  Connect,  42 

Craigslist,  54 

Creepy  app,  45-46,  153 

Crystal  Palace,  London,  129-30, 
135-38, 143-44, 146 

Cult  of  the  Amateur  {Yittn),  17,  175 

Culture  of  Narcissism  (Lasch),  103 

Curtis,  Adam,  47, 104, 143 

Cyclometer  app,  40,  156,  159 

Dailybooth,  40 

Daily  Burn,  42 

The  Daily  Dot,  ?> 

Daily  Mail,  138 

D'Angelo,  Adam,  32,  176 

Darkness  at  Noon  (Koestler),  151 

Darwin,  Charles,  115, 118,  180 

DateMySchool.com,  68 

Debord,  Guy,  69 

des  Cars,  Laurence,  126 

Dewey,  John,  63-64 

Dickens,  Charles,  16 

Difference  Engine,  93,  136 

DirecTV,  39 

Disney,  43, 166 

Ditto  app,  41 

Doerr,  John,  26-27,  36,  38, 48,  50 

Domino's  Pizza,  41 

Do  Not  Track  bill,  165 

Douthat,  Ross,  25,  107 

Dow  Jones  VentureSource,  78 


Drucker,  Peter,  110,  125,  130,  154 
Dunbar,  Robin,  174-75,  177 
Dylan,  Bob,  100 
Dyson,  Ester,  109 

Economist,  155 
Eco,  Umberto,  14,  148 
Edison,  Thomas,  94 
Edward  VII,  (king  of  United 

Kingdom),  123-24,  129,  177-78 
Edward  VIII,  (king  of  United 

Kingdom),  178 
eEvent,  63 

Einstein,  Albert,  123 
Ellison,  Larry,  57 
Elowitz,  Ben,  59-60 
"Emerald  Wave,"  84 
Empire  Avenue,  62,  153 
Endomondo,  43-44 
Engels,  Friedrich,  132-33 
Englebart,  Douglas,  107 
European  Union  (EU),  166-67, 

171-72 
Evans,  Robin,  19 
eXelate,  78-79 

Facebook,  2-3,  9-10, 17,  33, 155. 

See  also  Zuckerberg,  Mark 
age  restriction  by,  34,  166,  169 
egalitarianism  and,  23-24, 62, 74-76 
founding  of,  176-79,  185-86 
Frictionless  Sharing  by,  39,  59,  60, 

63,65,171 
friendship  concepts  and,  173-75 
funding  of/valuation  of,  6,  27,  30, 

35,60-61,202^51,214^64 
Google's  competition  with,  36,  38, 

207«114 
intelligence  v.  stupidity  and,  49-50, 

54,55 


236 


INDEX 


Facebook  {continued) 

loneliness/isolation  and,  27-30, 
67-69,70-74 

Open-Graph  on,  58-61,  63, 66, 77, 
83, 171 

privacy  on,  23,  28-29, 40,  57-60, 
65-66, 76-80,  83, 118, 142, 156, 
163-64, 167-71 

regulation  of,  163-64,  167 

revenue  by,  76-80,  110,  168 

Shaker  on,  43, 45 

social  unity  via,  61-64 

Timeline  on,  60-61, 66 

usage/popularity  of,  28,  30-31, 72, 
114 
The  Facebook  Effect  (Kirkpatrick),  112 
Fairchild  Semiconductor,  95,  98,  100 
Fanning,  Shawn,  38-39 
Farmer's  Insurance,  41 
Farmville,  32 
Fast  Company,  155 
Federal  Trade  Commission,  163-65 
Fertik,  Michael,  77-78,  80,  168 
Fibit,  42 

The  Filter  Bubble  (Pariser),  77 
Financial  Times,  51,  59-60, 107, 155, 

162 
Fincher,  David,  27,  176 
Firefox,  38 

Fitzgerald,  F.  Scott,  86-87,  90 
Fiavor.me,  62 
Flipboard,  40 
Florida,  Richard,  96 
Foer,  Joshua,  171-72 
Forbes,  5,  60 
Ford,  41 

Foreign  Affairs,  73-74 
Fortune,  91 

Foucault.  Michel,  20,  21, 76, 143, 145, 
192 


foursquare,  23,  32, 40, 45, 48,  50,  56, 
103,114-15,118,156,159 

Fowler,  James,  118 

Franken,Al,  165-66 

Frank,  Thomas,  109 

Franzen,  Jonathan,  24-25,  103,  179, 
184-85 

Frictionless  Sharing,  39,  59,  60,  63,  65, 
171 

Fried,  Charles,  141 

Friedman,  Benjamin,  137 

Friedman,  George,  72-73 

Friedman,  Thomas,  111 

friendship,  concept  of,  173-79 

Friendster,  6 

Fucked  Company,  169-70 

Fundly,  42 

Future  Shock  (Toffler),  103 

Gabler,  Neal,  24 

Gain  Fitness,  42 

Galbraith,  John  Kenneth,  92 

Cannes,  Liz,  59 

Gatorade,  41 

Gellner,Ernest,  139,  158 

GeneralEiectric,91,  110 

geo-location  services,  23,  32, 40, 45, 48, 

50,  56-57, 103, 114-15, 118, 156, 

159, 164,  200«22 
on  smartphones,  79,  81-83,  153, 165 
George  V  (king  of  United  Kingdom), 

178 
George  VI  (king  of  United  Kingdom), 

178-79 
Germany,  nationalism  in,  139-41,  171 
GetGlue,  39 
giantHello,  43 

Gibson,  William,  149, 152, 154, 156 
Giggs,  Ryan,  54-55,  162-63 
Ginsberg,  Allen,  100 


INDEX 


237 


Girl  With  a  Pearl  Earring  (Chevalier), 

180, 190 
Gitlin,Todd,92,99 
Gladwell,  Malcolm,  70 
Glaser,  Rob,  44-45 
Gleick,James,  76-77,  113 
Glow,  39 
Godin,  Seth,  111 
Goldin,Ian,  124 
Goldman  Sachs,  60 
Gombrich,  E.  H.,  126 
Goodman,  Paul,  101-2 
Google,  17,  31,  33,  57-58, 95, 155 

+,  2, 9-10, 17, 35, 36-37, 39, 156, 
170 

+1,36,79-80 

Android  phones  by,  79,  81-83, 142, 
153, 165 

Emerald  Sea  campaign  by,  34-35,  36 

Facebook's  competition  with,  36,  38, 
207«114 

Gmail  by,  37,  38 

IPO  by,  6 

Latitude,  23 

Maps,  40 

privacy  and,  164-65, 167-68, 170 

regulation  of,  164-65, 167 

SPYW  by,  37-38 

Street  View  app  by,  77,  167 
Gordon,  Bing,  27 
Gowalla,  40 

GratefulDead,98, 107,  112 
"Great  Exhibition  of  the  Works  of 
Industry  of  all  Nations,"  129-37, 
146 
The  Great  Gatsby  (Fitzgerald),  87 
Greenfield,  Susan,  69,  114,  123 
Greplin,  38 
Grindr,  79 
Gross  Happiness  Index,  58,  182 


Grossman,  Lev,  28 
GroupMe,  35,  39 
Groupon,31,35,42, 168 
Grubwithus,  42 
Guardian,  71, 171 
Gundotra,  Vic,  34-37, 170 
Gutenberg  Galaxies  i}AcL\x\izn),  112 

Habermas,  Jurgen,  52 

Hagel,John,91,106,  116,  119 

Halberstam,  David,  92 

Haque,Umair,48,54,99 

Hard  Times  (Dickens),  16 

Harkin,  James,  107 

Harris,  Josh,  149-55, 160, 190 

Harvard  Business  Review,  48 

Harvard  Law  Review,  7, 16,  162 

Hashable,  62,  153 

Hastings,  Reed,  39 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  52 

Hearst,  William  Randolph,  14 

Heath,  Edward,  123 

Helmore,  Tom,  86 

Henry  VIII  (king  of  England),  116,  118 

Herrmann,  Bernard,  92,  188 

Hey,  Neighbor!,  42,  157 

A  History  of  Private  Life  (Goulemont), 
101 

Hitchcock,  Alfred,  1, 16,  84-90,  98, 
100,105-6,117-20,148,155, 
181, 188, 192 

Hitchens,  Christopher,  47 

Hitlist,48 

Hobsbawn,Eric,  135,  183 

Hoffman,  Reid  (@quixotic),  5-8, 

12-13, 15, 17-18,  20, 26, 29-30, 
33, 35-36, 40, 44, 46, 48-50, 74, 
76,82-83,111,113,115,122-24, 
142, 145, 148, 150. 154, 155. 158, 
160, 168, 175-76, 191, 193 


238 


INDEX 


Hooper,  Tom,  178 

Horowitz,  Bradley,  34-37,  38,  170 

The  Hotlist,  23, 41, 44, 66 

Huffington,  Arianna,  9,  1 11 

Hughes,  Robert,  127 

Hulu,39,59 

Hutton.  Will,  124 

Huxley,  Aldous,  1,  19,  140 

Hyperpublic,  35, 43,  150 


78,82.103,124,142-44, 
149-50, 155-56, 160, 162-72, 
175-78, 190-93, 199«52, 227«12 
In  the  Plex  (Levy),  37 
Into.Now,  39, 45, 66, 156, 159 
Introduction  to  the  Principles  of  Morals 

and  Legislation  (Bentham),  131 
Jhe  Italian  Job,  147 
iTunes  Ping  network,  39 


IBM,  41,  110 
iCloud,  166 
identity 

individual  autonomy  and,  16-21, 

50-52,91-92,180-93 
nation-state  v.  social-media,  6,  49, 

123, 138-40, 145, 154-60 
Idylls  of  the  King  (Tennyson),  1 26 
Ignore  Everybody  (MacLeod),  111 
ImageSocial,  40,  50 
The  Independent,  171 
industrialage,  109-13,  183 

internationalism  and,  130-42, 

225«28 
The  Information  (Gleick),  113 
"Inside  the  Wale"  (Orwell),  56 
Inspection-House  design,  7,  13,  19-24, 

26-27,  29-30, 44-45, 61, 73, 

79-80,  83, 85, 133, 140-44, 146, 

148, 150-51, 199«3 
Instagram  app,  32, 40,  50,  133,  156, 

159, 164 
Intel,95,98, 106, 155,  167 
IntelliProtect,  168 
Internet,  106-9.  See  also  social  media/ 

networking 
business  infrastructure  on,  38-39, 

41-42 
Web  2.0  V.  3.0,  5,  17,  22,  24,  26-27, 

32-45, 48,  50-51,  53,  58-59, 62, 


James,  Lebron,  55 

Jarvis,  JefF,  26, 48,  52-57, 74, 101, 

115-16,118,167,185 
Jenkins,  Simon,  71 
Jig>43 

Jobs,  Steve,  107 
Johnson,  Boris,  123 
Johnson,  Paul,  126 
Johnson,  Steven,  25,  80,  115,  118, 

149-50, 154 
Jumo,  42 

Kaflca,Franz,21,76,79 

Kaplan,  David,  94-95 

Kaplan,  Philip,  169 

Karabell,  Zachary,  75 

Keller,  Bill,  173, 175,  179 

Kelly,Kevin,96,  107,  112,  115 

Kerouacjack,  100,  104,  108 

Kerry,  John,  166 

Kewney,  Guy,  26 

Kik,  39 

Kindle,  43,  82 

Jhe  King's  Speech,  178-79,  182 

Kirkpatrick,  David,  6\,\y^ 

Kirn,  Walter,  47-48,  54, 66, 71, 142, 

148 
Kleiner  Perkins,  27,  32,  35,  40,  62 
KLM,40 
Klout,62,63,75, 119, 156 


INDEX 


239 


Koestler,  Arthur,  151 
Kred,62,63,75, 153 
Kristallnacht,  140 
Kuneva,  Meglena,  76 
Kutcher,  Ashton,  40 

Lanier,  Jaron,  115 

Lasch,  Christopher,  103 

Latakoo,  60 

Leadbeater,  Charles,  166 

Leapman,  Michael,  137 

Leary,  Timothy,  100 

Lee,  Christopher,  54-55 

Lee,  Steve,  81 

Lehrer,  Jonas,  50-51 

Leibowitz.Jon,  165 

Le  Meur,  Loic,  169 

"Let's  Get  Naked"  (Jarvis),  52 

Letter  to  D'Alembert  (Rousseau), 
101-2 

Levy,  Steven,  37 

Like  Minded,  42 

Linchpin  (Godin),  1 1 1 

Linkedln.  2,  5, 9-10, 17, 23-24, 35, 
49-50,56,67.76,110.155 
IPO  by,  6, 197«28 
Terms  of  Service  for,  168 
user  statistics  for,  30,  33 

Linklider,J.C.R.,  107 

Livejournal,  71 

The  Living  and  the  Dead 

(Boileau/Narcejac),  16,  26 

LivingSocial,  31,  35, 42,  50, 150 

Lockheed,91, 102, 110 

Logue,  Lionel,  178-79 

London  Guardian,  59 

London  Independent,  48 

loneliness,  27-29.  38-39,  66-69 

Loopt,  40 

Loselt,  42 


MacLeod,  Hugh,  111 
MacMaster,  Tom,  73 
MacroWikinomics  (Tapscott/ 

Williams),  49-50 
Malaysia  Airline's  MH  Buddy,  40 
Malcolm  X,  123 
Malmaison  Group,  147-49 
Malone,  Mike,  8,  94-95, 113. 122. 148 
Mamas  and  Papas,  97-98 
The  Man  in  the  Gray  Flannel  Suit 

(Wilson),  92 
Manymoon.  43 
Mao.  Chairman.  115-16,  119 
Marcuse,  Herbert,  100-101, 102,  104, 

117 
MarkofF,John,96, 107 
Marshall,James,86,95 
Marx,Karl,  100,  102,  105,  119, 

132-33, 142, 183 
McAdam,  John  Loudon,  183 
McCain,  John,  166 
McGilligan,  Patrick,  106 
McKenzie,  Scott,  97-100 
McLuhan,  Marshall,  49, 112-13, 

126-27 
McNealy,  Scott,  57-58 
Media6Degrees,  78-79 
MediaMath,  78-79 
Meebo,  38 
Meetup.com,  71 
MeMap  app,  40.  164 
Meyer.  Dick,  55.  109 
Meyer,  Jean,  68 
Mezrich,  Ben,  176 
Microsoft,  38, 41. 165 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  10-11,  132, 164 
individual  autonomy  and,  16,  21,  50, 

92, 182-85, 189-90, 192-93 
Mills,  C.Wright,  92 
MingleBird.43.44.62 


240 


INDEX 


Miso,  39 

Mokrjoel,  130 

Monster.com,  41 

Monterey  Pop,  99 

Monterey  Pop  Festival,  97-100, 

103-4 
Moonwalking  with  Einstein  (Foer),  171 
Moore,  Gordon,  94-96, 106, 155, 175 
Morales,  Christian,  167 
More,  Sir  Thomas,  116,  127, 150 
Moritz,  Mike,  35-36 
Morozov,  Evgeny,  73-74 
Morris,  Jan,  121-22,  127, 147 
Morris,  William,  125 
MoveOn.org,  77 
Mozilla  Firefox,  38, 165. 167 
My  Fav  Food,  42. 156, 159, 164 
Myspace,  67, 174 

Napster,  39 

Narcejac,  Thomas,  16,  26 

National  Data  Breach  Law,  165 

Nations  and  Nationalism  (Gellner),  139 

nation-state  identity,  6, 49,  123, 

138-40, 145. 154-60 
The  Net  Delusion  (Morozov),  73 
Netflix,  39 
New  Atlantis,  25 
New  Scientist,  82 
Newsweek,  94 
New  Yorker,  70 
The  New  York  Times,  5, 25,  33,  39, 

49-51, 53, 59-60, 68. 80-81, 83, 

96,107,109,111,114,168-71, 

173, 174 
News.me  by,  40 
The  Next  Decade  (Friedman),  72 
Nextdoor.com,  42,  67,  157,  172 
"The  Night  Watch"  (Rembrandt), 

190-91 


Nineteen  Eighty-four  (Orwell),  4,  21, 
37, 45-47,  56-57, 78-79, 141-42, 
151 

Noonan,  Peggy,  64,  86-87 

Noyce,  Robert,  95,  106 

Obama,  Barack,  156,  165 
Occupy  Wail  Street  movement, 

51.71,99 
One-Dimensional  Man  (Marcuse), 

100-101, 104 
The  Onion,  28-29 
On  Liberty  (Mill),  21,  50. 132, 164, 

184, 192 
On  the  Road  [Ktvou^c),  100, 104, 108 
Open-Graph,  58-61,  63,  65.  83, 171 
OpenStudy,  42 
O'Reilly,  Tim,  142-43 
Origins  of  Totalitarianism  (Arendt),  141 
Orwell,  George,  4,  21,  37, 45-47, 

56-57,62-63,74,78-79,92, 

141-42, 151 
Out  of  Control  (Kelly),  1 1 2 
Outside.In,  115 
Owyang,  Jeremiah,  63 
Oxford  Mai  Hotel,  7-8,  20, 147-50, 

154, 160 
Oxford  University,  174,  177 

Union  Library  in,  4-9,  121-29,  154, 

171. 178. 192 

Page,  Larry,  36,  81,  155 
Pandora,  39, 79 

Panopticon,  20.  See  also  Inspection- 
House  design 
Pareto,Vilfredo,75,  123 
Pariser,  Eli,  77 
Parker,  Sean,  2,  12,  38-39, 42, 45,  57, 

130. 176. 193 
Path,  39, 169 


INDEX 


241 


Paxton,  Joseph,  135,  138,  143 
PeekYou,  35,  38, 44 
Peerlndex,  62, 75 
Pennebaker,  D.  A.,  99 
personal  data,  28-29,  142-43,  168. 
See  also  privacy 
destruction/erasing  of,  167, 

171-72 
as  economic  entity,  32-33,  62-63, 

76-80,119,152-53 
facial-recognition  apps  and,  80-81, 

118,164,167 
geo-location-related,  23,  32, 40, 45, 
48,50,56-57,79,81-83,103, 
114-15,118,153,156,159,164, 
165,  200^22 
legislation  protecting,  162-67 
Personal  Inc,  168 
Philips,  John,  97-98 
Philo,  39 

Pincus,  Mark,  6,  27,  29-30,  32, 49 
Pink,  Daniel,  110-11 
Pinterest,  39 

Plancast,23,4l,48,66, 103, 156 
Politics,  8, 197«33 
"Politics  and  the  English  Language" 

(Orwell),  63 
Poniewozik,  James,  55 
I        Poynter,  59 

Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  125-29, 
130, 133, 136, 180, 183, 186, 
225«9,231«1 
Prince  Albert  V.  Strange,  161-62, 178 
privacy,  7-8,  15-18, 44,  141.  See  also 
personal  data 
businesses  selling,  168-72 
data  destruction  and,  167,  171-72 
on  Facebook,  23,  28-29, 40,  57-60, 
65-66,76-80,83,118,142,156, 
163-64, 167-71 


facial-recognition  apps  and,  80-81, 

118,164,167 
geo-location  services  and,  23,  32, 40, 
45, 48,  50,  56-57, 79, 81-83, 103, 
114-15,118,153,156,159,164, 
165, 200«22 
legislation  protecting,  161-67 
public  experiments  with,  149-52 
transparency  v.,  46-48,  52-69, 
154-60 
"Privacy,  Publicness  &  Penises"  (Jarvis), 

26 
Private  Parts  (Stern),  26 
Proust,  41 
Pseudo.com,  149 

publicness,  52-64, 149-52, 154-60. 
See  also  privacy 
theses  on,  26,  IQlnAA 
Public  Parts  (Jarvis),  26, 116,  167 
Punch,  135 
Putin,  Vladimir,  71 
Putnam,  Robert,  113,  115,  117,  126 

"Quiet:  We  Live  in  Public"  project, 

150-51, 154, 160 
Quota,  32, 44, 176 

Raban,  Jonathan,  4 

RadiumOne,  42 

Ramo,  Joshua  Cooper,  71 

Rapportive,  38 

Ravi,  Dharan,  53 

Reagan,  Ronald,  123 

RealNetworks,  44 

Reding,  Viviane,  167,  171 

Reeves,  Richard,  183 

Rembrandt  van  Rijn,  4,  66,  186-88, 

190-91 
Renaissance  period,  49, 65-66, 127 
Reppler.com,  168 


INDEX 


Reputation.com,  77,  80,  168 

Research  In  Motion  (RIM),  2-3,  15 

Rethink  Books,  43 

Rhapsody,  59 

Rheingold,  Howard,  26 

"The  Right  to  Privacy"  (Warren/ 

Brandeis),  7,  16,  162 
Rijksmuseum,  Amsterdam,  3,  12, 

187-90 
The  Rise  and  Fall  of  Elites  (Pareto),  75 
Roberts,  Bryce,  51 
Rock,  Arthur,  95 
Rockefeller,  John  D.,  165-66,  169 
Rockmelt,  38 
Rogers,  Roo,  50 
Rolphe,  Katie,  23 
Rosedale,  Philip,  8,  69, 122-25. 

127-29, 142, 148, 151, 175 
Rosen,  Christine,  25,  62,  187-89 
Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  121,  125-28 
Roszak,  Theodore,  101-2 
Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques,  101-2,  116-17 
RushkofF,  Douglas,  77-79 
Ruskin,John,  127,  136,  138 
Russell,  Lord  John,  129, 132-33 
Russia,  nationalism  in,  141-42 
Rypple,  39, 44 

Saarland  University  (Germany),  171 
Sacca,  Chris,  8,  35-36, 122, 148 
Safety  Web,  168 
Salesforce,  41 
Sandberg,  Sheryl,  57,  61 
Sanders,  Jerry,  9 
"San  Francisco"  (song),  97-100 
San  Francisco,  culture  of,  84-105 
San  Francisco  Magazine,  5 
San  Francisco  Oracle,  99 
San  Francisco  Scientific,  9 
Sarkozy,  Nicolas,  163 


The  Scarlet  Letter  (Hawthorne),  52 
Schama,  Simon,  187 
Schmidt,  Eric,  57-58, 70,  88, 163-64 
Schumpeter, Joseph,  96,  111 
Scoble,  Robert  (@scobleizer),  28,  57, 

74,83.111,155-60,164,172, 

174, 190 
Scorcese,  Martin,  84 
Scott,  Ridley,  47 
Scribd,43,44 
Second  Life,  8,  69, 119, 123-25. 128. 

129 
Sennett,  Richard,  101,  102,  159 
Shaker,  43. 45, 47 
Shirky,  Clay,  22-24, 70,  107,  115, 

117-18,126 
Shockley,  William,  94 
ShopSocially,  42 
ShoutFlow,  42 
Showyou,  38 
Shteyngart,  Gary,  144,  152-54, 

184-85 
Siegler,  MG,  36 
Silicon  Valley,  4-9,  27-28,  84, 90-97, 

106-7, 112-13, 119, 155. 221«17 
"Silicon  Valley  Comes  to  Oxford" 

conference,  4-9. 121-29, 145-49, 

154 
Simmel,  Georg,  4,  21,  177 
Simpson,  Wallis,  178 
Sina  Weiba,  25, 74 
Singer,  Natasha,  83,  168 
Skype,35,39,4l,53-54, 168 
smartphones,  2-3,  11-12, 14-15,  18, 

22,  24, 40, 70-71, 122-23, 142, 

153, 199«53 
geo-location  reporting  by,  79,  81-83, 

153, 165 
Smith.  Zadie,  27. 79.  184-85.  190 
SnoopOn.me,  45-46, 118, 153 


INDEX 


243 


Snyder,  Gary,  100 

The  Social  Animal  (Brooks),  115 

Social  Bakers,  43 

Socialcam,  35,  38,  50,  66 

Socialcast,  35 

SocialEyes,  35,  38, 44-45, 47-48,  50, 

66, 170 
SocialFlow,  35 
Social  Intelligence,  33 
social  media/networking.  See  also 
personal  data;  privacy 
advertising  revenue  and,  35-37, 42, 

62-63,76-80 
architecture,  contemporary,  of, 

22-45 
businesses  evolving  towards,  35-45 
civil  unrest  and,  70-74 
connectivity  principle  in,  6-10, 
16-21,27-30,38-39,50-52, 
61-64,91-92, 106-20, 180-93 
consumer  literacy  regarding,  167-68 
economic  influences  of,  27,  33, 42, 

62-63,76-80,110-11,119 
egalitarianism  and,  23-24, 48,  62, 

74-76,155-56,227^220 
friendship  concept  and,  173-79 
identity  perceptions  and,  6,  16-21, 
49-52,  91-92, 123, 138-40, 145, 
154-60, 180-93 
integrity  and,  49,  53-56,  61 
intelligence  v.  stupidity  resulting 

from,  48-56, 61-64, 66, 69 
by  kids/teens,  30-31,  34, 43, 67,  166, 

169 
loneliness  and,  27-29,  38-39,  66-69 
narcissism  enabled  by,  24-25,  115, 

181-82 
regulation  of,  161-67 
technological  v.  sociological 
influences  on,  106-20,  184 


unity  as  goal  of,  6-10,  52-69, 

106-44 
SocialNet,  6 
The  Social  Network,  2,  12, 27, 42,  64, 

109, 130, 176-79 
SocialSmack,  43 
SocialVibe,35,42 
Social  Workout,  42 
Society  of  the  Spectacle  (Debord),  69 
Sonar,  40, 44 
Sorkin,  Aaron,  64,  176 
Soundcloud,  39 
Soundtracking,  39 
South  By  Southwest  conference,  52 
Spotify,  59,  171 
SproutSocial,  35 
Stalin,  Joseph,  141,  143 
Starr,  Kevin,  87 
Steadman,  Philip,  189 
Stelter,  Brian,  50 
Stern,  Howard,  26 
Stewart,  Jimmy,  86,  88 
Stone,  Biz,  8-9,  11,  12,  17,  29,  31,  50, 

116,122,124,148,155,191,193 
Strange,  William,  161-62 
Strauss,  Neil,  24-25,  50 
Sullivan,  Andrew,  111,  123 
Sullivan,  Bob,  165 
Sullivan,  Paul,  171,  174 
Summer  of  Love/counterculture, 

97-105,107-9,112-13,115 
Super  Sad  True  Love  Story  (Shteyngart), 

152-54 
Suster,  Mark,  51 
Swanson,  Larry,  114 

Tapscott,  Don,  49-50,  54, 65, 99, 101, 

107 
Taylor,  Bret,  169 
Taylor,  Frederick  Winslow,  91 


244 


INDEX 


Techcrunch,  36, 43,  57, 72-73,  111, 

142, 152, 156, 159, 169-70 
technology,  22 

culture  influenced  by,  93-96,  106-9, 

113-20, 130-42, 184, 221«25, 

225«28 
economic  shifts  related  to,  109-13, 

116-19, 184 
internationalism  and,  130-42, 

225«28 
Tencent,  74 

Tennyson,  Alfred,  126-27,  130 
TextPlus,  79 
Thaler,  Richard,  166 
Thatcher,  Margaret,  123 
Thiel,  Peter,  176 
33Across,  78-79 
Thomas,  Imogen,  54-55 
Thompson,  Richard,  114 
Timberlake,  Justin,  2 
Timeline,  Facebook,  60-61, 66 
Time  magazine,  27-28,  53,  55, 71, 75, 

115 
Timoner,  Ondi,  151-52 
Tocqueville,  Alexis  de,  21, 70 
Toffler,  Alvin,  103 
Togetherville,  35, 43, 44. 166 
Topix,  52 
Tout,  38 

transistor,  invention  of,  93-96 
Tresch,  John,  119 
T^f  7r/W(Kafka),21,76 
Tribe.net,  6 
Tripit,  40, 66, 156, 159 
TrufFaut,  Francois,  88 
The  Truman  Show,  16,  30, 115. 150, 

156-59 
TRUSTe.  168 
Tsotsis,  Alexia,  169-70 
Tucker,  Catherine.  78 


Tumblr,32,39,71 

Turkic,  Sherry,  67-70,  83, 103, 119. 151 
Turner,  Fred,  107-8 
Twenge,  Jean,  24-25 
Twitter,  2-3,  5, 11. 12-15, 17, 79-80, 
110-11,157,159,168,187 
intelligence  and,  50,  54-56 
privacy/isolation  and.  29.  67,  70-74 
regulation  of,  163-64 
social  value  and,  23-25,  62,  74-75, 

155-56, 227«20 
users/popularity  of,  8-9,  30-32, 72. 

114-15, 173, 176 
value/funding  of,  9,  35-36,  198«37 

Understanding  Media  (McLuhan),  112 
unity,  social 

debate  on,  4-9, 121-29, 145-49, 154 
historical  attempts  at.  129-42 
via  social  media,  6-10,  52-74. 

106-44 
transparency's  impact  on.  52-69, 
121-44. 149-52 
University  College.  London,  1-4. 

10-16, 180 
University  of  Michigan,  67 
University  of  Southern  California, 

83,114 
University  of  Twente  (Netherlands),  172 
University  of  Vermont,  67 
utilitarianism,  10-12,  16-17,  22,  27, 
50,61-64,91,113-14,140-41, 
180-82, 198«45 
t^o/>/^(More),  116,  150 

Vamosi,  Robert,  81 
van  Heerde,  Harold,  172 
Vaynerchuk.  Gary,  111 
Vermeer,  Johannes,  4,  66,  186.  188-90, 
191 


INDEX 


Vermeer's  Camera  (Steadman),  189 
Vertigo  (movie),  ix,  1,  16,  84-90, 98, 

100,105,117-20,148,155,181, 

188-89 
Vertigo  (Sebald),  ix 
"Vertigo"  (song),  ix 
Victoria,  Queen  (United  Kingdom), 

123, 129, 135-36, 161-62, 178 
Virtually  You  (Aboujaoude),  24 
Vkontakte,  71 

The  Wall  Street  Journal,  5,  27,  33, 

35-36,41,58-60,64,78-82, 

109,111,168,171,176 
Wanderfly,  40 
Wang  Gongquan,  25 
Wang  Qin,  25 

Warren,  Samuel,  7,  13, 16, 22,  162 
Washington  Post,  \62,  171 
Watt,  James,  94 
Wazeapp,40,66, 156, 159 
Weather  Channel,  79 
Weinberger,  David,  52 
Weiner,  Anthony,  54-55 
Weir,  Peter,  150,  159 
We  Live  in  Public,  151 
WeLiveInPublic.com,  152,  153,  154 
Wells,  Orson,  14 
Werd,  Ben,  59 
We  The  Media  (Gillmor),  82 
What's  Mine  Is  Yours  (Botsford/ 

Rogers),  50 
WhereBerry,4l 
Where  Good  Ideas  Come  From 

(Johnson),  115 
Wherel'm.at,  57,  81 
WhereTheLadies.at,  56-57 
Whole  Earth  'Lectronic  Link,  26,  107 
the  Who,  98, 103-4 
Whoworks.at  app,  56-57 


Whyte,  William  H.,  91-92 

Why  We  Hate  Us  (Meyer),  55 

Wiener,  Norbert,  112 

WikiLeaks,  23,  55, 163 

Wikipedia,  17 

Williams,  Anthony  D.,  49-50,  65 

Wilson,A.N.,  126, 133 

Wilson,  Sloan.  92,  111 

Winfrey,  Oprah,  40 

Wired,  50, 75,  107 

"Woman  in  Blue  Reading  a  Letter" 

(Vermeer),  188-90,  191-92 
Woodward,  Benjamin,  121-22,  124, 

126-27, 129, 135, 178, 192 
Wordsworth,  William,  126 
World  Economic  Forum,  33 
The  World  for  a  Shilling  (Leapman), 

137 
Wortham,Jenna,60,  169 
Wozniak,  Steve,  107 
Wu,  Tim,  107-8 

JheX-Factor,  39 

Xobni,  38 

X-Pire  software,  171 

Yahoo!,  35 

Yammer,  39 

Yatown,  42, 67, 157 

Yobongo,  39 

YouCeleb,  24 

YouGov,  83 

YouTube,  17,  35,  37,  39,  59 

Zak,  Paul,  114 
Zenergo,  42 
Zimmer,  Ben,  63 
Zittrain,  Jonathan,  60 
Zizek,  Slavoj,  166 
ZubofF,  Shoshana,  109 


246 


INDEX 


Zuckerberg,  Mark,  83,  155.  See  also 

Facebook 
Facebook's  founding  and,  176-77, 

185-86 
Gross  Happiness  Index  by,  58, 182 
privacy  concerns  and,  58-60, 163, 

166-67, 171 


social  connectivity  theories  of, 
27-31,33-34,39,49-50,56, 
58-66,76,88,96,106,112-13. 
142, 146, 184 

Zukin,  Sharon,  78 

Zynga,  6,  27,  30,  32,  35. 42, 168. 
197«30 


andrew  keen. 


author  of  th 


Valley  entrepreneur  \n 
in  The  Wall  Street  Joi 


lateur,  is  a  Silicon 
riting  has  appeared 
le  New  York  Times, 


The  Economist,  and  Wired.  As  the  founder  and 
CEO  of  Audiocafe.com,  Andr'^-'  "--^^  ■- —  *'^'^*'"' 
in  many  magazines,  inch 
2.0,  and  Fast  Company.  He  is  currently  the  host 


.    .      ir  show  Keen  On,  a  regul 
columnist  for  CNN,  and  a  celebrated  oublic 


California. 


Contact  andrew  keen  at  www 
follow  him  on  Twitter  at  @ 


St.  martin's  press 


advance  praise  for  #digitalvertigo 


'A  bracing  read.  From  Hitchcock  to  IVIark  Zuckerberg  and  the  politics  of  privacy,  a 
savvy  observer  of  contemporary  digital  culture  reframes  current  debates  in  a  way 
that  clarifies  and  enlightens."  —Sherry  Turkle,  author  of  Alone  Together 

"Andrew  Keen  is  that  rarest  of  authors:  one  who  has  taken  the  time  to  understand 
the  benefits  of  technological  innovation  before  warning  us  of  its  risks.  In  Digital 
Vertigo,  Keen  finds  himself  in  a  dizzying  world  where  it  is  not  just  possible  to  share 
every  detail  of  our  professional  and  private  lives,  but  actually  expected.  While  a 
growing  number  of  his  friends— including  those  in  the  upper  echelons  of  Silicon 
Valley  society— preach  the  gospel  of  total  transparency  and  cyber-oversharing,  he 
refuses  to  blindly  click  the  'accept'  button.  A  vital  and  timely  book  that's  terrifying, 
fascinating,  persuasive,  and  reassuring  all  at  the  same  time." 

—  Paul  Carr,  author  of  Bringing  Nothing  to  the  Party  and  The  Upgrade 

'In  this  timely  and  important  book,  Andrew  Keen  once  again  thinks  one  step  ahead 
of  social  media  pioneers,  posing  questions  they  will  need  to  answer  or  risk  facing 
a  digital  uprising.  Equal  parts  philosophical  and  informative.  Digital  Vertigo  brings 
us  back  to  nineteenth-century  debates  that  have  an  eerie  relevance  to  today's 
technological  dilemmas,  while  also  laying  out  the  latest  corporate  strategies  being 
deployed  to  decipher  and  commercialize  your  most  intimate  thoughts.  Better 
than  any  other  multimedia  expert,  Keen  challenges  the  false  promise  of  the  virtue 
of  sharing." 

—  Parag  Khanna,  director  of  the  Hybrid  Reality  Institute  and  author  of 

How  to  Run  the  World:  Charting  a  Course  to  the  Next  Renaissance 

'Unlike  most  commentators,  Andrew  Keen  observes  the  Internet  as  if  from  a 

^ ■  )f  the  few  books  on  the  subject  that,  twenty 

years  from  now,  will  be  seen  to  have  gotten  it  right.  Neither  blinkered  advocate 
nor  hardened  cynic,  he  identifies  the  good  and  the  bad  with  a  rare  human  and 
historical  perspective."  —Sir  Martin  Sorrell,  CEO,  WPP 


ISBN  ^73- 


52599  > 


780312"624989